


Power Games

by Aleph (Immatrael)



Series: Gamesverse [3]
Category: Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha | Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
Genre: AU Rewrite, Action/Adventure, Canon Foil, Dammit Nanoha, Gen, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-12 09:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 250,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1184729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Immatrael/pseuds/Aleph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no such thing as happily ever after. Life goes on - even dearly bought. All Precia's plans may come to nought as shadowy actors take to the stage. But nothing unmasks a man like his use of power.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

She awoke, gasping.

How long had she been asleep? It felt like forever. The depths of slumber had crept up on her again, tangling her in warm, sinuous fingers and refusing to relinquish their hold on her exhausted body, as they had been doing with increasing frequency in recent memory. She glanced out of the window – the skies were dark. They had been light when she had last looked. Hours, then, at the very least. This hadn’t just been a short doze; it had been one of her long sleeps.

But now she was awake again, and raw, visceral energy surged through her with almost painful strength. Normally, after a short nap, she struggled to climb out of the soporific pit and into full wakefulness. Here, though, she was slammed out of it in a way that hadn’t happened in a long, long time.

She ached all over. Her mouth felt as dry as a desert; her arms felt like something was jabbing pins and needles into them; her legs were useless lumps of meat. That was familiar. Yes, she thought in bemusement, that was familiar. When she woke up suddenly, it always hurt. Was it the awakening that hurt, or the pain that made her awaken? That she was less sure of.

The room was dark. Shadows shifted in the corners, and a strange glow came from somewhere off to her right. She lay on her back, head to one side, momentarily unable to recall exactly where she was. The ceiling was bare, offering no clues, and there was a strange glow from some source that she couldn’t pick out that was dimly illuminating the room, deepening the shadows and shifting oddly where it played off the empty shelves stacked against the wall at the far end of the room.

Despite the torrent of energy that boiled in her chest and flooded down her veins, making her stomach churn and something in the back of her mind slot together in a familiar-yet-alien way, her body was still weak. Crying out softly, she struggled to lift herself up on her elbows and lever herself into a sitting position. When that failed, she simply reached upwards and backwards blindly for a light, any light at all, to see where she was.

A smooth hand closed over hers and gently but firmly pressed it back to her chest. Its owner was still outside her field of vision, and made no noise as they slid an arm under her and helped her up into a sitting position. She coughed harshly, still disoriented from the energy surge and the nausea, and the hands held her chin up and steadied her as the coughing fit wracked her slight body. The blinking glow of tear-blurred lights from a display beside her bed played starkly off her convulsing frame without regard for her misery.

Once the attack had passed, she lifted a limp hand to rub at sleep-encrusted eyes and looked groggily at her helper. No, her _helpers_.

Four figures knelt before her in front of another tightly packed bookcase, their heads bowed. They wore strange clothing, simple and uniform, and they glowed with the same unearthly light that illuminated the room. She looked at their apparent leader, the woman who had helped her, and rasped something unintelligible.

She looked up, apparently deciphering the attempt at speech, or at least garnering the general meaning. “Worry not, my liege,” she said in a cold, clinical voice. The words were an attempt at soothing, but the manner in which they were delivered sounded more like she was reading them off a card. “We are your servants, here to protect you. We are your will made manifest.”

The girl blinked, still groggy and confused. She... remembered something about this, didn’t she? Some sort of... dream she’d had. Or something. It was hard to think. She was still so very tired. Numbly, she stared at the strange glowing woman as she stood.

“Worry not,” the woman repeated. “All will be well, now that we are here. Sleep once more. We will wake you soon.”

Sleep. That sounded good. She didn’t want to sleep forever. But a little nap, for just a bit longer... yes, that sounded good.

“We will guard you as you rest,” intoned one of the other figures, as their leader laid a cold hand on the girl’s forehead. “Sleep, and regain your strength.”

She slept.

...


	2. Chapter One

The sun of the world called Schzenais was red. Nanoha still wasn’t used to it. It was huge, too, though nowhere near as hot as the one she’d grown up with. It made for a cold world under a dark blue sky, where some of the brighter stars were visible even during the daytime. The light was reddish, and cast long, deep shadows across the snow that piled up against buildings in knee-deep droves wherever the heat of the sunlamps didn’t melt it.

On one particularly chilly afternoon, it also filtered past the falling snow and in through the windows of a well-insulated building on the outskirts of one of the major sub-arctic cities, where a lesson was underway. Nanoha Takamachi, nine-year old mage and Earth-born native, tore her gaze from the fast-falling snowflakes and dragged her attention back to the classroom, and by extension the teacher at the front of it. The woman was tall and statuesque, and her hair reminded Nanoha of what Yuuno’s... no. Shaking her head slightly, she put that thought firmly to one side and tried to refocus on the history lesson.

“This meant that the Praovéan Dynasties were one of the last Dawn State superpowers to develop,” the teacher was saying. “And one more prone to in-fighting than the others. Does anyone know what the best example of that is?”

Hands rose. Nanoha’s was not among them. Dimensional space history was, for obvious reasons, a subject she knew nothing about. It was also confusing, because there was quite a lot more of it.

The teacher scanned the raised hands and raised here eyebrows at the owner of one of them. “Miss Daytona,” she said, and it was a second or so before Nanoha remembered that was the surname Fate and her family were using. She looked around in surprise. Fate had grown up on the Garden, and her education had more been in magic and combat than in history. She was usually no better in this class than Nanoha herself was.

Fate herself seemed unaffected by her friend’s stare. “The Benlil Crusades,” she offered softly. “When... I think one of the ancestor-hubs attacked the others near to it?”

The teacher nodded approvingly. “Very well done, Miss Daytona. Yes, the Benlil Crusades happened because of in-fighting between the different Dynastic families. At that point, there were eight major families and nine more minor ones. Now, we’re going to look at the major ones and how they differed from each other...”

 _‘How did you know that?’_ asked Nanoha, tuning out of the lesson for a moment to speak silently to Fate. She got a mild look of disapproval in return – they weren’t supposed to talk during lessons, even by telepathy. But Fate relented after only a moment, and replied in kind.

 _‘The Praovéan Dynasties were built on Lost Logia they called ancestor-thrones,’_ she explained. _‘Life support mechanisms – that’s what the hubs were, dozens of ancient Dynasts all networked together. They didn’t die as long as they were connected to their thrones... it was one of the things Mother investigated for Alicia.’_

“Ahem. Miss Ceres?” The teacher’s eyes were apparently sharp enough to spot those not paying attention, and the girl was half-sure there was something which alerted her to the use of telepathy in-class. This time, luckily, Nanoha did remember that ‘Nene Ceres’ was her. She hadn’t been forgetting as often recently, but she had needed reminders from Raising Heart whenever her name was called for the first month or so.

“If you would care to repeat what I just said?” It was a question the woman was fond of asking students she suspected weren’t listening, which Nanoha hadn’t been. Luckily, Raising Heart had been. Having not learnt the language yet, Nanoha still needed her Device to translate, and a mental nudge rewound the whisper prompt she had been using in the hopes that hearing both the language and the translation would help her learn faster.

“Uh... the Rochestein House was the second-oldest, and didn’t change as much as the others, and they had a lot of territory on Type-2 worlds,” she answered, and sweated for a few seconds as the teacher narrowed her eyes at her. The woman’s suspicions aside, though, the answer had been correct. With a curt nod, she turned back to the board and continued the lesson, outlining the major Houses and the different cultural practices they had, along with the reasons they came into conflict with each other and the other groups of the time.

History was the last lesson of the day, and so once it was finally over, Fate and Nanoha were free for the rest of the afternoon, albeit with a homework assignment to do by the end of the week. It was already getting dark outside, despite it only being early afternoon. The day on Schzenais was rather shorter than the calendar day – and for that matter the human body clock day – so sunlamps were used to provide light when the sun wasn’t in the sky.

The school day drifted a little throughout the year to try and line up with the hours of actual daylight as much as was reasonably possible. At the moment, that meant it started rather early in the morning, which gave them most of the afternoon free after picking up Alicia, Vesta and Arf from their classes. They angled towards the junior portion of the school grounds, mutually adjusting their Jackets to fend off the vicious bite of the cold.

“You really shouldn’t do that,” Fate accused, once they had got a fair distance away from the crowd of escaping students. “You were running one of your mental simulations during mathematics, too. I could tell.”

Nanoha shrugged. “Maths is easy,” she defended herself. “And you’re still ahead of me in magic, I need all the practice I can get. And history is just confusing.” She pouted. “The language doesn’t help, either. I thought I would be doing better than this.”

Fate gave her a sympathetic look. They still couldn’t communicate very well without their Devices translating for them. Nanoha could just about manage slow, simple conversation, but anything in-depth or at normal speed gave her trouble, and complex topics were still impossible.

The walk was a fairly short one, and they arrived to find the younger years still spilling out of the low, insulated building. This far north, all the buildings hunkered close to the ground – aesthetics in architecture came second to keeping the cold out and weathering the blizzards. By the time they got there, the trio they had come to pick up was already waiting for them outside.

“Farina!” called Alicia excitedly, jumping up and down and waving. “Nene! It’s home time, home time! Guess what we did today!” She ran over, trailed by Vesta and Arf, both of whom were grinning. Their child-forms were tweaked to look the same age as Alicia herself, with their familiar traits concealed. It was good for them, Nanoha thought. They were both technically younger than Alicia herself, and schooling with children closer to their maturity level, without the pressures of combat and terror, was doing them some real good.

The fact that it put two A-rank combat familiars in the same room as Alicia on bodyguard detail didn’t hurt, either. Nanoha had a feeling that might have been part of why Precia had agreed so readily to the suggestion.

Fate returned Alicia’s hug with a smile, and offered her left hand to Arf as Alicia claimed her right. Vesta, by contrast, made a beeline straight for Nanoha, hopping up and down in a happy little dance. “Today was _fun_ ,” she crowed gleefully, as she happily embraced her ‘sister’. “We got to...”

“Hey!” warned Alicia. “It’s my story, don’t steal it!” She turned back to Fate eagerly. “Guess what we did!” she demanded, as they set off back to the home Precia had rented. “I bet you can’t!”

Laughing, Fate swung their linked hands back and forth as Alicia skipped to keep up with her longer strides. “Did you do really well on some classwork?” she asked, and was rewarded with a headshake that sent blonde tresses falling into Alicia’s face as the younger girl’s eyes gleamed mischievously. Nanoha noticed Arf and Vesta both bubbling with suppressed anticipation as they shook their heads in unison. So, it had been something they had all done.

“Did you all do really well in a game?” she ventured. Another giggle of mirth, and another set of headshakes were her reply.

“One more guess!” chimed Arf, drawing further giggles from the trio. Fate shook her head fondly.

“I give up,” she conceded. “What did the three of you do?” They were approaching the edge of the school grounds, nearing the tram stop that lay across the street. The snow was starting to die away, too, which was a hopeful sign. Alicia and the familiars might be equally happy out of school as in it, but Fate didn’t like having to miss school when the snow piled too high, even if it did mean she got to spend more time with her family. Though fortunately that was rare; they knew how to deal with heavy snow here.

“Well, basically,” Alicia began, “we were going to lunch, and looked at the menu, and it said that there was Dokei Stew for pudding!” Nanoha nodded. The sticky-sweet pudding reminded her a bit of toffee cakes, though it had a few spices in it that she didn’t recognise. Alicia loved the stuff, it wasn’t surprising that she’d be pleased about having it.

The little girl spun around dramatically. “But then,” she continued, throwing her hands out dramatically, “I found out something _horrible!_ That our year was in last for lunch! So it would all be gone by the time we got there!”

Nanoha and Fate traded glances. This sounded... ominous. Beside them, Vesta eagerly jumped up onto a low fence and began to pace along it with her arms outstretched – purely for dramatic effect, as her balance was perfect. Arf had found a stick, and was running it along the top bar of Vesta’s footing, knocking the snow off just in front of where she was stepping. They looked around eagerly as Alicia went on with her narration, walking backwards to better view her audience.

“And it would be really bad if we didn’t get pudding! So that’s when I went to get Ami and Vittoria!” Her lips didn’t quite match the names she spoke, as her civ-Device caught and changed her words to the aliases that Arf and Vesta were using. It had been agreed that it was a good idea to install that particular function on all three Devices, just in case of slip-ups.

“So Vittoria turned us all _invisible_ , and we snuck into the kitchens! And Ami sniffed out where the Dokei Stew was, and we had some!” Alicia beamed proudly. “It was _delicious_.”

Alicia chattered on in this vein, with Arf and Vesta jumping in to add detail as she described the close call they’d had when one of the kitchen staff had closed door and trapped them in one of the storerooms for an agonising seventy bajillion hours (“Two minutes,” Arf interjected dryly) and how they had managed to get a brief look into the office of the head of catering on the way out (“and she had _shiny ribbon_ , look!” said Vesta proudly, displaying her prize). Nanoha and Fate listened, neither willing to show their mild disapproval to the delighted girl – or for that matter able to get a word in edgeways.

 _‘Is it likely they’ll get caught?’_ asked Nanoha privately, voicing her own major concern. Fate sent a light wave of disapproval back, and shrugged.

 _‘I’m more concerned that they did it at all,’_ she replied. _‘But I don’t think so, no. Vesta has come a long way with her illusions. We should probably make sure they don’t do it again, though.’_

_‘How?’_

Rather than explaining, Fate opted to demonstrate. “So,” she spoke up, interrupting Alicia’s recounting of how the cooking equipment in the catering department was all super-sized and huge, “are you going to tell Mother all of this?”

Alicia froze, as did her partners in crime. “Uh...” she said, suddenly unsure. “Actually, could we... not?”

Fate held her gaze in ominous silence for a long moment, until the little girl began to squirm nervously. Then, as they stopped to wait at the station, she bent down slightly to look Alicia in the eye. “Okay,” she agreed, “but only as long as you _promise_ not to do anything like this again, okay? If you want a meal at school that they run out of, we’ll make you it at home that night. But sneaking around the kitchens will get you caught and in trouble.”

Alicia looked very much like she wanted to protest this point, and Vesta made a muffled indignant sound from somewhere near Nanoha, but neither objected verbally. “... kay,” she mumbled sullenly, before brightening as the tram pulled in. “Oh! Can I watch you and Nene practicing today?”

Fate hesitated, and Arf stepped in, a business-like air overtaking her childish happiness at the events of the day. “Sorry Lezi,” she apologised. “We’re doing paired combat today; so you won’t even be able to see most of it. And it’s still too dangerous with all the shooting we throw around.” She paused. “Well, all the shooting Nene throws around, anyway.” She grinned at Nanoha cheekily before turning back to Alicia. “Ask Lilian again – you can ask what puddings she can make at the same time. She said she and Pera would think about it, right?”

“Fine...” pouted Alicia. “But you have to give me flying rides to make up for it! And Vittoria has to give me invisible ones, too!”

Smiles came from both familiars, along with a soft giggle from Nanoha. Alicia’s pout was probably meant to be sulky or grudging, but the result merely looked adorable on her. Behind her shirt, it was just barely possible to make out a tinge of violet light as the mechanism that kept her alive flared up slightly in response to her emotions, before the illusion over it adjusted to compensate.

“I think we can handle that,” agreed Arf, concealing a smirk. “Now, tickets out and let’s get home.”

...

Half an hour later, the quartet had dropped Alicia off at home, and were several kilometres outside city limits, flying low and fast. This far from populated areas, as long as they kept their magic use low, they could practice with impunity and not have to worry about being detected. Getting there wasn’t hard for them, and they didn’t have to worry much about being followed. One of the first things Linith had done upon their arrival had been to hack the perimeter systems around the city to ignore them and to find safe areas away from flight paths, and she had insisted that the girls only wear whites, greys and blues while out practicing. Fate had grumbled, but eventually capitulated and made a temporary shift to her Barrier Jacket’s colour, lightening the black to a slate grey.

This time, they had chosen a sparsely wooded ravine that they had used before. A river ran down it on the cityward side, iced over near the banks but still flowing in the middle, and the snow that blanketed it looked fresh and pristine, untouched by the tread of any humans. From her perch on Nanoha’s shoulder, Vesta eyed it warily and with good reason. She had learned from harsh experience that the snowfall carpet during winter in this city was often thicker than she was tall. Jumping down would not only make her vanish beneath the surface, it would also make her cold, wet and miserable.

That had not been a pleasant process of discovery.

 _‘Okay,’_ said Arf, who had grown tired of romping through the snow after only two or three minutes of playful barking and running around like a maniac. She now sat at Fate’s feet, her tail wagging contentedly as lumps of slowly-melting snow slid off her thick orange coat. _‘We’re practicing synchronised fighting this time. Tag-combat sound good?’_ She waited for the affirming nods, and pawed at Fate’s ankle. _‘Okay then! Pick me up and let’s get started!’_

Fate narrowed her eyes at her familiar. “I am not picking you up while you are freezing cold and wet again,” she stated flatly. “Come here and hold still.”

She didn’t give Arf a chance to protest the order, leaning down quickly to grab her by the scruff of the neck with one hand while the other splayed out in front of her, a casting circle forming at her fingertips. It moved forwards, passing over Arf and evaporating the water from her fur. She whined quietly at the tickling sensation, and shook herself as soon as it was over.

“If you didn’t get wet, I wouldn’t have to do that,” Fate told her, entirely unsympathetic. “Now come on, up you get.” She glanced at Nanoha as she knelt down to gather Arf up into her arms and stow her in the small rucksack she was wearing. Arf fit quite comfortably into the little bag, which was sized just right for her puppy form and contained within the fields of Fate’s Barrier Jacket. Like Vesta’s position in Nanoha’s hood, the Jacket would keep her safely held there, able to poke her head out and see behind or in front of her mistress.

The kitten had already trotted around Nanoha’s shoulder and curled up in her favoured place. Well, one of them. A little grey head with tufted ears poked out of the hood and nodded happily. _‘We’re good to go!’_ she announced.

 _‘Right. How many shots shall we go to, then?’_ asked Arf.

“Can it be just one today?” Nanoha smiled apologetically. “It’s been a fortnight again, and I set up a scrying spell yesterday evening... I want to get home early to check up on my family. You know?”

“Of course,” Fate agreed smoothly. “One shot it is then. Ready?”

“Ready,” Nanoha nodded.

 _‘Ready!’_ chorused the familiars from their respective nests. Fate scooped up a handful of snow and compacted it down into a snowball.

“When it hits the ground, then,” she said, and tossed it high into the air. It sailed high into the air, shedding flakes as it turned over once and began to fall again. A soft puff of snow went up from where it landed.

And before it even began to settle, both girls were gone.

Tag combat was a game and form of practice they had devised to hone their skills while at the same time being relatively low-key. They obviously couldn’t go all-out so close to people who would notice, so they needed a more subtle way to spar with one another. It had been Arf who had come up with the idea of limiting themselves to low-level shooting spells, and marking the winner as whoever managed to land the set number of attacks first.

Nanoha went high. It wasn’t even a question, she knew from six months of experience that Fate would thrash her in dense or hemmed-in terrain. She often thrashed her anyway. The way the rules were set up favoured Fate’s high-speed evasion-focused style, and despite a learning curve that had worried Yuuno and that she’d heard Arf describe as ‘freakish’, Nanoha was well aware that her friend still outclassed her in straight combat. She could beat the other girl perhaps one bout every six or seven, and those wins were generally down to luck, Fate having a bad day, or pulling out a new trick that the blonde hadn’t seen before. None of the three tended to last long.

Reaching what she felt was a safe height; Nanoha looked around, keying her visor to thermal vision. As expected, she couldn’t see Fate – they’d both found ways of masking their heat signature without Vesta’s illusions some time ago – but it was worth a try. Shrugging, she double-checked with Vesta that her cloak was running at full capacity. Not just light, but heat and a decent fraction of the sound she was making were muffled under the kitten’s spell. Which was a good thing, because what she was about to do next would compromise that security.

Keeping her eyes and ears open and prompting Raising Heart to keep an eye out for movement in the open areas she could see, she began to circle. And as she did so, she released a Narrow Area Search spell towards one of the thicker groves of trees.

The first of many.

On the ground, concealed behind a mound that the generous might have described as a smallish hillock, Fate’s eyes narrowed as she saw the pink motes begin to drift down from the sky. Pulling back behind cover, she considered her options.

A tap to one of the black earpieces she wore summoned her gold-tinted visor, sleeker and thinner as Nanoha’s but identical in function. Another peek over the rise outlined the location of the search spells Nanoha was using, most of them in the wrong direction so far. With a Wide Area Search disallowed by the rules, Nanoha was making do with multiple smaller ones, systematically targeting every patch of cover that Fate could hide in. Their common centre gave Fate a rough idea of where she was, but she wasn’t making it easy. She was almost certainly circling even as she cast, so any triangulation of her position from the spells would be approximate at best.

Snow crunched under Fate’s hands as she pulled back behind the rise, unmelting under her touch. A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead, and she wiped it away, frowning. Configuring her Barrier Jacket to trap heat within the fields stopped her showing up on thermal scanners, but it was a double-edged sword. She was already starting to get uncomfortably warm, and sooner or later her Jacket would start leaking heat anyway. It was another time limit on how long she could stay hidden, and it was counting down.

She wracked her mind for a way to get to Nanoha. Briefly, she considered getting Arf to follow the girl’s scent trail, but discarded the idea. Not only would the wind work against her, following the scent trail in circles would leave her totally exposed, and an easy target. No, she needed some way to pinpoint her opponent, and soon. Before any of those search spells found her.

 _‘Any ideas yet?’_ asked Arf, and received a minute head shake. _‘Well then, we could always go with the chain-sweeping,’_ she suggested. _‘I mean, it’s a bit of a long shot but it could work.’_

 _‘No, she’d see it coming and dodge. We need to narrow down her position more accurately first, then we can try... hmm.’_ A tiny cascade of snow spilled down over her hand, dislodged by her earlier movement, and the seed of an idea took root. _‘Okay, I think I have something. Listen closely, Arf. Here’s what I need you to do...’_

Forty seconds of quick but careful work later, their preparation time ran out. Bardiche’s mental tone alerted her to a search spell converging on her location, and Fate didn’t waste any time. Like a golden arrow, she shot out from her hiding place and towards the rough area she thought Nanoha was currently occupying.

Pink light flared, widely spaced enough that it didn’t pinpoint any source in particular. It coalesced into balls of light that shot towards her, half a dozen shooting spells in each barrage. She dodged and swerved around most of them, and the football-sized spheres of orange that orbited her darted into the path of those she couldn’t avoid. She lost two of them as they were broken by the force behind the shots, scattering their payloads harmlessly. But that was fine; she had brought a dozen for a reason, and ten was still more than enough.

Reaching roughly the right height, she darted left to avoid another wave, and shouted without care to keep her communication private. _‘Now!’_

The spheres, to a one, exploded. Snow burst out from them in a fine powder, directed outwards and away from her, saturating the air with a fine mist of snowflakes. Fate’s head was already turning as Bardiche searched the cloud for any sign of movement, any holes, any motion that disturbed it. Nanoha might be invisible, but she wasn’t intangible, and her presence in the cloud from the improvised grenades would show up like a light on Fate’s visor...

... there.

Fate flashed in, anticipating Nanoha’s next step and meeting the hasty barrage of shooting spells with her own. The flashes from their collisions were briefly blinding – one or two slipped past her, but Arf responded instantly, deflecting them with barriers so that Fate didn’t even need to think about them. She couldn’t afford to, she knew what was coming next and while she thought she had a way to circumvent it, it was totally untested and would need all her concentration to pull off.

And as expected, as she closed the rest of the distance to Nanoha, she felt the spike of a Flash Move. The other girl was trying to get away, to get distance again, to separate them and return to her optimal range. But she wasn’t the only one with mobility spells. And Fate was better at them.

Focusing every mote of processing power she could spare on the mana trace, Fate threw herself into a Blitz Action. But instead of targeting it to an endpoint location, she latched onto the fading mana trail of Nanoha’s Flash Move. It was something she’d only come up with recently, following another person’s speed spell, and she wasn’t entirely sure it would work. But she pushed her mana into the spell – more than usual, to compensate – and blurred.

It was a bumpy ride, rougher than her normal crisp, clean bursts of high-speed movement. The accuracy wasn’t that good either, she came out at least two or three metres behind Nanoha, who was still dusted with a fine coat of snow that was falling off her in trickles, giving away her position. But they were forty or more metres from where they had been, and she was still in close range. Nanoha was facing the wrong way, and Fate knew where she was now, and she was moving even as Nanoha’s HUD screamed a warning at her, bringing her scythe up to strike.

Vesta saw her coming and leapt, giving up on invisibility and shifting to her War Form as she lunged towards Fate, putting herself in the way of her mistress. But Arf was ready for that, and orange chains snarled her as Fate blurred into another Blitz Action – draining, so soon after the last, but just as quick – and came out of it on the other side of Nanoha even as the girl turned, Raising Heart swinging up to point in the direction Fate had just left...

... and with a blindingly fast whisper of movement, the crackling blade of Bardiche’s scythe form gently touched the fields above her neck.

Silence fell, and they hovered there for a moment. Both were breathing hard, Nanoha from shock and panic, Fate from the strain of following Nanoha’s Flash Move. Slowly, Fate pulled Bardiche back and shifted it back into its default axe-blade configuration. “I win,” she said simply. A blow with Bardiche counted as much as a shooting spell.

Nanoha pouted. “Yes, I know,” she grumbled, her pride stung at having lost. But curiosity suppressed it. “How’d you do that? You can’t have known where I was going, I picked it at random.”

“I followed your Flash Move, actually.” Arf released Vesta from the bind spell, and the four of them began to drift down to the ground again. Vesta returned to Nanoha’s hood sulkily, muttering to herself in a string of unintelligible little growls and mewls. “Speed moves like that leave a mana trail, I just keyed mine to follow yours. It was harder than I expected, though. I’ll need to practice.”

 _‘Nanoha can help you practice!’_ Arf suggested, and Fate raised an eyebrow at her friend. Nanoha wrinkled her nose, still a little sore about her loss, but nodded.

“Fine. But you have to show me how you did it in return!”

Fate tilted her head, thinking about it as they landed near the top of the crevasse and began to head back up the path towards the city. Linith had been very clear that they weren’t allowed to fly home, in case they were spotted. “Well...” she said uncertainly, “I’m not sure you’ll have the speed to pull it off, but... sure, I’ll show you how the spell works. Oh, and Vesta’s getting better, too! I couldn’t find you at all at first.”

 _‘I know!’_ cheered Vesta smugly. _‘Soon I’ll be able to cloak mistress even when I’m not right next to her, and then I can do_ fun _stuff!’_

“The snow thing was clever,” Nanoha admitted. “And using the barriers to block me, too. Well done, Arf.”

 _‘I wish I’d got to use my chain idea, though,’_ Arf grumbled. _‘I’ve been waiting for a chance to use that.’_

“Oh?”

 _‘Nuh uh!’_ Glaring at Nanoha over Fate’s shoulder, Arf shook her head stubbornly. _‘It’s a secret, I’m not giving it away ahead of time. You’ll have to wait until we beat you with it!’_

 _‘Lies!’_ objected Vesta, bouncing back out from Nanoha’s hood onto her shoulder. _‘Next time we’ll beat you! And you’ll be all humiliated and beaten and be going “why did I say that I would beat the amazing Nanoha and Vesta like that? I feel so silly and foolish!” and everything!’_

“Alright, alright, calm down,” said Nanoha, giggling. “And let’s get home again. I want to see my family.”

...

It was a cold walk back through the streets of the city, pale blue advertising boards and the gold of the sunlamps washing over her face, which gave Nanoha time to think. And yes, gave her time to brood. It was at times like this that she most missed home; the anticipation of seeing her parents.

It wasn’t that she was homesick. Not one bit. She was brave and strong and she was really happy here! So what if she couldn’t talk to people without Raising Heart to help? So what if when she tried to practice the language outside of the house, people made fun of her accent and the way she could only stumble through basic conversations? So what if she had no real friends, that she was far more of an outsider than Fate – who was like a foreigner to the gaggles of tall blonde girls, while she was like someone who had been raised in some backwoods community? So what if the few sort-of-friends she did have were more Fate’s friends than hers, and only hung around her because Fate refused to exclude her? So what if she stood out from all the girls in her year who... who were taller than her and looked a bit like Alicia and Fate in that same vague sort-of-not-quite-Eastern-European-ness?

She... she just wanted to see her parents and her brother and sister and Suzuka and Arisa. And just wanted to be in her home where she knew people and it wasn’t cold all the time and... and she still wanted to live near Fate and Alicia but why did it have to be _here_ of all places.

In her more rational moments, she knew why it had to be here. Schzenais was a world in the TSAB core planets, near the centre of where the ancient empires called ‘Belka’ and ‘Galea’ from her history lessons had been, and had the high living standards associated with that. But it wasn’t a TSAB Administered world; it wasn’t even a normal Aligned one. It didn’t have standardised extradition treaties. If the Enforcers came for them here, it’d be an act of war.

So Precia had picked out this world, found a city, and chosen a – fairly expensive from what Nanoha understood – private school for her two daughters, her niece – Arf – and two sisters, the daughters of a family friend who had died. They were day students, but Precia had gently hinted to them that when she got too sick they would switch over to being boarding students. It was all neat and planned out; funds and arrangements set up until they were adults. It all made sense.

But Nanoha didn’t _want_ it to make sense. Right now, she – oh so selfishly – just wanted to be home.

The scrying spell was getting a feed back when they arrived home. Linith drifted into the room as Nanoha sat down in front of the screen it was anchored to, and tried not to look like she was hovering.

“Remember to be careful,” she cautioned. “If you lose the signal, you’ll have to wait another day to try again.”

Nanoha nodded, not really listening. It was advice she’d heard before, anyway. Even through dimensional space, there was a limit to how fast light could travel. With eleven light-hours between them and Earth, it had taken almost a full day for the spell she had laboriously cast the previous evening to return with what it had seen. Now she just had to decipher the signal to see how her family was doing.

“Raising Heart?” she asked. “I’m going to need you to handle this again, okay?”

[Ready,] chimed the Device. [Just like always, master.]

With Raising Heart’s help, the images began to resolve from the signal that had returned. Well, ‘help’. Nanoha was aware that her Device was the one handling most of the mathematics in this case, even more than usual. She knew basically _what_ she was doing – Linith had explained it as being like sending lots of video cameras to Earth and then catching what they were sending back – but how it worked was entirely beyond her. She was sure that if she could understand the maths, she could do it better... but when she had tried taking one of the spells apart, it had only looked a tiny bit like the normal search spells she did grasp. Even with Raising Heart’s help, she’d made mistakes with one or two of the fortnightly spells she was allowed to see her family with, and Precia only let her retry once each time to avoid the TSAB noticing.

On that note, Nanoha couldn’t really argue with her. Precia was doing an enormous amount for her – Nanoha’s skills at magic had improved in leaps and bounds since the elder Testarossa had begun to teach her, and she was swiftly closing ground on Fate in terms of magic, though the blonde would probably always be better than her at the tactical side of combat. There was a small amount of resentment – on one occasion she’d messed up with the second spell as well, and had to wait for another two weeks to see how her family was doing. But she was well aware that everything they’d all worked for would be ruined if the TSAB found out they were still alive. Secrecy was still their best defence.

With Raising Heart’s help, the first images began to ripple into view. She went for the ones around her house first, looking fondly at the familiar garden. From the light levels, it looked like it was early evening – it was tricky keeping the relative times straight, given the differing day lengths – but there weren’t any lights on inside. Maybe they had gone to sleep already? Nanoha wrinkled her nose in annoyance. She liked seeing them up and about – fast asleep was boring, and felt a bit awkward. Well, maybe her mother would sense the scrying spell and wake up. Would sense – would have sensed, rather. The idea that this was all almost eleven hours ago was still hard to get her head around. She switched to a different image, one from inside.

It was the kitchen, still unlit. But... Nanoha frowned. She could see the clock from here, and it looked like...

“Raising Heart?” she asked. The Device could analyse the fine details of the feed much better than she could. “What time does that say?”

[6:30, master,]

Nanoha frowned again, peeved. That was far too early for them to be in bed. Maybe they were out, then? She huffed irritably. “Raising Heart, can you find Mama’s feed, please?” She had been planning to see how Arisa and Suzuka were doing, but she wanted to see her family first.

[Got it,] Raising Heart confirmed. After a short pause as it located and deciphered the correct feed, the image resolved itself for Nanoha to see. For a brief moment, stunned silence filled the air. Then...

“ _Mama!_ ”

Nanoha’s terrified scream brought Fate, Arf and Vesta into the room at a dead run.

“Nanoha? What is i...” Fate’s voice cut off in a gasp as she skidded to a halt beside her friend and caught sight of the screen herself. Vesta mewled in distress and Arf sputtered for a moment as she sought for words.

 _‘What_ happened? _’_ she demanded furiously, finding her voice. _‘Why is she... how did she...?’_

On the small screen, Momoko lay propped up on a couple of pillows in what was clearly and recognisably a hospital bed. She looked awful, with three large welts covering the left side of her face and an ugly purple black eye swollen enough that it was doubtful whether she could see out of it. The rest of Nanoha’s family, as well as Arisa and Suzuka, were in the room with her, in varying states of agitation.

Arisa was the most obviously angry, animatedly waving her arms and shouting something Nanoha could barely catch, apparently directed towards the room at large. Kyouya looked almost as furious as she did. Suzuka and Miyuki looked more concerned and upset than angry, and Shiro’s face showed no emotion at all. Only a hard, impassive mask, with only the set of his jaw and his hooded brows giving away the rage it was holding back.

Whatever Arisa was shouting about seemed to tail off, and Shiro said something short and pointed. The sound was fuzzy, and Nanoha didn’t quite catch it, but from the reactions of the others, it was evidently a question of some kind. All heads turned to Momoko, and Nanoha raised the volume slightly to hear.

Her mother looked up blearily, considered for a moment, and then shrugged.

“I don’t know,” she said apologetically. “I didn’t see them... I sensed magic nearby, and called out. Nobody answered, so I tried to put up a shield. And then... something hurt, in my chest, and I saw a light. And then everything went black.”

Nanoha’s lips pressed together thinly. So. Her mother had been hurt by something magical, and she hadn’t seen what had done it. More than that, she must be magically exhausted as well – normally, Momoko could sense when Nanoha was scrying on her, and would smile or wave, but she seemed entirely oblivious at the moment. And one shield wasn’t anywhere near that strenuous. Whatever had hurt her, it had sucked away her mana. Nanoha turned around to find that Precia had entered the room at some point, and was regarding her gravely.

The young girl looked her mentor of the past six months in the eye. Her voice was almost steady, with only the faintest trace of a quiver. “I have to go back,” she said bluntly and somewhat unnecessarily. “My mother is hurt. I need to help her.”

...

Alicia knew how sucky and unfair it was when your mummy was hurt, because her mummy bad been sick or something – nobody had quite explained it in detail – ever since she had woken up again from how she’d been asleep for years and years and years like the magical princess woken from her frozen tomb after her kingdom had been wiped out in that story. Only it had only been twenty five years, instead of a thousand. Which wasn’t quite the same.

She was still adjusting to that, to be honest. But even though it was the future and she was technically _old_ – like, thirty _years_ old! – things in the worlds didn’t seem too different to what she remembered. The big differences were in the people she knew – her mummy was older and paler and iller, and Linith was huggy and warm but hadn’t been there before.

And then there was her sister. She had a big sister! Only technically she was a little sister, just one who was bigger than Alicia, but ‘big-little sister’ sounded weird. Maybe ‘little-big sister’ would work better. Anyway, she was called Fate, and was kind of serious, but she was always very intent on making sure Alicia was happy. Linith had told her that Fate and her friend Nanoha had fought and done lots of work to make Alicia better from how she’d been asleep, so she owed them a lot.

And now Nanoha’s mummy was hurt! It was like a sign, though exactly what it was a sign of, Alicia wasn’t entirely sure. Still, she was certain of one thing. Nanoha had helped her mummy when Alicia was in her hurt-sleep, and the fact that Alicia was awake and able to go to school and play with Arf and Vesta – who were both totally cool because they were super-secretly animals and familiars – today was largely down to that. The older girl had even had to leave her family behind and come with them, and while it was clear she liked magic and Fate and Alicia herself, she still got very homesick sometimes.

She had worked very hard, and given up a whole big lot of things, to help Alicia’s family.

So now that her mummy was in trouble, it was only fair that they helped hers. Alicia was not one to stand around when someone she cared about was upset. She burst into the room and drew herself up to her full height, which was admittedly still rather unimpressive.

“We’ll help!” she declared forcefully. “Right, mama? And if someone mean did it, you and Big Sis and Arf and Vesta can beat them up and maybe make them say they’re very sorry and then they might join our side like you did with Big Sis and then I would have more friends and your mama would be better and everything would be better!”

Silence followed this announcement for a moment, before a watery giggle escaped Nanoha, breaking the pale mask of horror and fear she had been wearing. After a few more sounds somewhere between laughs and sobs, she got up and hugged Alicia gratefully.

“Thank you, Alicia-chan,” she mumbled croakily. “That made me feel a bit better. And thank you for offering to help.” She looked over uncertainly at Arf and Fate as she said it. Fate nodded firmly, and the wolf rolled her eyes in response.

 _‘Oh, yeah. Like there was any chance whatsoever of us not being right behind you in this.’_ She huffed. _‘I told you, you’re family. We’ll...’_

“We will not be rushing off anywhere,” a smooth voice cut her off. Arf’s eyes widened and Nanoha’s face crumpled as all heads turned to Precia, and silence fell again. It eventually fell to Vesta to break the confused quiet.

_‘... what?’_

Precia sighed tiredly, thoughts moving fast as she rubbed at her temples. With a hand gesture and a command to her Device, she brought up a map of the relevant projection of dimensional space, hanging purple-lit in the air. On one side of the map was where they were, Schzenais , surrounded by trade routes and world details. As they panned, the marked worlds and routes thinned out, until they reached the lonely marker for Unadministered World 97, almost the final world along its chain. Silently she stared at the map, as if commanding it to be different. The children were silent, perhaps grasping the seriousness of the moment.

“I am not forbidding Nanoha from going to her mother’s aid, child,” she rebuked, after a quiet moment of thought. “Although I must ask her how serious she is. If she is certain that she wishes to travel for the better part of a month to get there and back, for what might just have been a normal accident.” She glanced at Nanoha.

“It’s not just an accident!” Nanoha said fiercely. “And I’m going and that’s fi...”

“As I said, I am not stopping you,” Precia said. “Merely... setting limits on how. Think. It has been six months, but the Bureau’s attention may still not have faded entirely. I am... reluctant to allow any travel back at all...” she glanced at Alicia, who was staring at her with a stubborn expression that foretold great trouble if she didn’t hear a result she liked, and capitulated, “... but under the circumstances, I cannot reasonably deny Miss Takamachi’s obvious need to return to her home.”

She pursed her lips, considering. “It would be best to keep numbers as low as possible to reduce the teleport signature,” she decided. “Nanoha will of course be going, and I would suggest that Linith go with her to deal with any remaining sensors – doubly due to the fact that they are almost certainly not calibrated to detect her signature, and she can therefore get close enough to compromise them. However... I would suggest that everyone else stay behind.”

 _‘No way!’_ Vesta protested. _‘You can’t ask me to stay behind while Nanoha goes into danger!’_

“I can,” Precia frowned at her, “and I will. This first trip is for reconnaissance, nothing more. For the purposes of stealth, the party size must be kept as low as possible. Nanoha and Linith are both necessary – they will go in, see what happened and send a message back to us. Unless you can give me a good reason why you are essential to the process, you are staying here.”

 _‘But... I mean...’_ Vesta looked helplessly at Nanoha and Linith. The older cat-familiar smiled reassuringly at her.

“Don’t worry,” she soothed. “I’ll be there with Nanoha to keep her safe, and if we do find trouble, we’ll call you in. Okay?”

Vesta didn’t look terribly happy about it, but she nodded reluctantly. _‘I guess I can trust you to look after her,’_ she admitted. _‘You are a cat, even if you’re not me.’_

That drew giggles or chuckles from everyone save Precia, and Nanoha fondly ruffled the fur on her kitten’s head. “I guess we’ve never been apart for more than a day before, huh?” she mused. “Don’t worry. We’ll be back together before you know it, and you can take my place guarding Alicia-chan while I’m away. I trust you to do a good job!”

...

Despite Nanoha’s optimism, however, she and Linith did not get to Earth and back so soon. The trip to Earth took a week.

It wasn’t an eventful week. There were many adjectives Nanoha could use to describe it – frustrating, monotonous, exhausting, tense with worry – but ‘eventful’ was definitely not among them. The days blurred together in what seemed like an endless series of teleports, jumping again and again with short, ten to twenty minute breaks on each world to recharge before another gruelling dimensional shift.

It had been a thing of bitter disappointment to Nanoha to find that magic could only go so fast. Literally. Three hundred thousand kilometres sounded like a really long way to go in a second, but distances in dimensional space were really, _really_ long. It took her spells _eleven hours_ to get to Earth and as long to get back. And spells could travel in a way that she - as a person, not a small packet of mana - couldn't.

A reasonably powerful mage could cover around a light-hour a day via teleport, if they jumped as often and as far as possible for as long as they could, and made use of whatever teleport-boosting stations they could find. It was draining, brutal work that left a mage shattered at the end of every day, and for extended trips it was almost always preferable to take a ship instead. The might be considerably slower, but they also meant that you didn’t collapse onto the floor every evening and wake with barely enough mental stamina to manifest a Jacket, let alone face another eight-hour series of jumps.

But Nanoha had no interest in comfort. Speed was her objective, and though her muscles screamed and her bones ached with weariness, she pushed them to go ever faster. And it was working. Her impatience aside, Linith reassured her every night that they were making good progress, half as fast again as most mages would be capable of. Seven days, the cat-familiar told her, was as fast as they could expect to go, and it was unlikely that the situation had worsened too much in that time.

On that last note, Nanoha suspected Linith was lying to spare her feelings – she knew from experience how shockingly quickly a situation could descend into chaos – but there was no way to check, not when they were still hours out and a scrying spell would take more time and power than they had to spare. They couldn’t even communicate with Precia and the others, not with Linith masking their presence to the best of her abilities.

And so they came, eventually, to the last camp. A bare three hops from Earth, they reached it in what by the opinion of their body clocks was late evening, and what seemed to be somewhere in the middle of the afternoon by local time. Nanoha had wanted to keep going the tiny hop further to Earth, but Linith had overruled her, setting up their tent in the shade of a large, sprawling rock pile that sheltered them from the wind on three sides.

“No,” the cat-familiar said flatly. “We’re both exhausted, it’s already early evening over there, I don’t trust myself to conceal our arrival enough that any potential hostiles might not detect it, and most of all... Nanoha, hold out your hand.”

Scowling at her stubbornly, Nanoha did so. It trembled with fatigue, mirroring the low-level shaking of her whole body. Linith gave her a knowing look, apparently able to sense the throbbing headache and lead weights that had apparently replaced Nanoha’s bones at some point via some kind of maternal telepathy. Or possibly she was just looking at the shaking and the way she couldn’t stop her eyes blearily slipping out of focus every so often. Either way, Nanoha was forced to admit that she might – just might – have a point.

This didn’t seem to be enough for the older woman, who decided to make it an easier choice for her. “Look,” she said gently. “Nanoha. You know full well you’re in no condition to do anything if you arrive on Earth now. If there is any real danger, the only thing you’re capable of doing at the moment is to fall over on it. And if there isn’t, it won’t matter if we wait another few hours to rest up and get some strength back. Besides, I have something I want to give you before we go in. So I’ll make this simple, either you go to sleep on your own, or I use a soporific spell to _make_ you. I’m not as tired as you, so you’re in no condition to throw it off.”

“... can’t you go forward, then?” Nanoha asked. It was definitely just asking a simple academic question, and not in any way whining, no matter what kind of raised eyebrow Linith gave her. “Or just scry on them to check they’re okay? Please?”

But Linith remained dispassionately uncompromising. “Even if I weren’t magically exhausted myself,” she declared, “I’m not going to do anything that might alert whatever might be waiting for us. But, if you think you can stay awake long enough, I will show you the surprise I’ve brought along. For obvious reasons, we don’t want to give away who we are. So I brought along a little remodel for your Barrier Jacket – something to conceal your identity. You can load it into Raising Heart and be fairly free to operate without fear of being recognised.” She paused. “Just... ah... don’t go _too_ overboard with magic. This is a fairly high-end disguise, and the colour-shift it applies to your magic will be relatively secure, but your bigger spells may well break it. And... are also fairly recognisable on their own.”

Nanoha cocked her head in interest. “A disguise?” she mused. “What does it look like? Can I see?”

Linith nodded. “Yes... now, bear in mind. Firstly, it won’t be able to do much to disguise your height if it’s to be at all effective, so you’ll still look fairly young. Secondly, the shifting of your magic colour is an illusion worked into all of your spells – that means it’ll be overhead on Raising Heart, so it will slow all your other spells down and make them harder. And thirdly, sufficiently advanced equipment will be able to unscramble the alterations, so be sure to just run if someone like the TSAB show up – they can probably identify you from the spectral pattern of your magic, given the amount of footage they have of it.”

Nanoha blinked warily at her as she explained, and Linith noticed her eyes slowly sliding closed every few seconds before she tugged them open again with what appeared to be a concentrated effort of will. She quietly resolved to repeat this lecture for the girl tomorrow morning, when they were both rather more awake.

“Now, with all that said,” she continued, “the altered Barrier Jacket you’ll be wearing looks like this.” Pressing her hands together, she drew them apart to reveal a slowly turning three-dimensional image of the proposed disguise. Nanoha examined it quietly for a few moments, scrutinising it from all angles.

“... it looks a bit... bland,” she eventually mumbled. The exhaustion was really starting to show, and Linith smiled. “And it covers... it’s a... what’s the word for the head-covery thing? Like a hood bit but all around?”

“It’s a helmet, and it’s there to make you generic and hard to identify,” Linith teased gently. “And I think now you really need to go to bed. Go on, shoo. I’ll wake you up in the morning.”

Grumbling something resentfully in her native tongue –which Raising Heart either didn’t bother to translate or couldn’t understand due to how Nanoha was slurring her words – the girl crawled into the tent, her Jacket dissolving around her as she did. She was out like a light within seconds.

A few minutes later, Linith delicately stepped into the tent in cat form and picked up Raising Heart from where it lay next to its master’s pillow. A brief check told her that yes, Nanoha had set an alarm to wake herself up early the next “morning”. And pre-set the teleport spells that would take her to Earth, no less. Linith wasn’t terribly surprised to see that the girl had only allotted herself four hours of sleep. Nanoha was depressingly easy to predict in some ways, once you got to know her. You just had to imagine wilfully ignoring your limits right up until the point you collapsed.

Quietly removing the alarm and dropping the Device back next to its owners head, Linith curled up on top of her. The familiar feeling of a cat in her bed might help her sleep better. And besides, it was cold. She wasn’t worried about Nanoha waking up before her. The girl was so exhausted that left to herself, she probably wouldn’t wake up until next morning local time, for all that it was the middle of the afternoon at the moment. And Linith wanted her to sleep for as long as possible. Both of them were tired from the gruelling race to get here so fast, and for all that she had stayed optimistic about the situation being benign for Nanoha’s sake, the cat-familiar had a sinking feeling that it wasn’t.

Twelve hours of sleep wouldn’t put Nanoha back up to peak condition. Not by a long shot.

But it might be enough to stop her from getting hurt if things turned as sour as Linith feared.

...

“Big siiiiiis!” A percussion in Fist minor hammered out its symphony on the door. “Big sis! Help!”

Fate blinked, startled from her reverie. She looked up at the window reflexively, but it was no use; it was a blizzard outside from what she could see in the sunlamp-lit darkness. How long had she been sitting here, staring at a static palm-sized picture? Never mind. She shook herself, gesturing the door open and swivelling round in the slightly-oversized chair her room’s desk came with. A mental nudge flipped off the name-replacement subroutine in Bardiche – they were at home, after all, and the false names began to grate after a while. She was willing to use them at school, but for a little sister in distress they were most definitely not appropriate.

“Alicia?” she asked concernedly. “What’s- oh.”

Her little sister had her arms around another little girl, grey-haired and blue-eyed, swathed in her trademark black frock. She was currently red-rimmed from crying, and her lips held a definite wobble to them.

“Vesta is all upset and crying and I don’t know what to do!” explained Alicia frantically. “I tried hugging her and saying things would be alright and it didn’t work! It just got my dress all wet! And you’re really smart and good at crying stuff and thinking and things so I brought her to you so make her stop because it’s bad when people are crying and she’s sad!”

“Um,” said Fate, caught off-guard and trying to adjust to this sudden torrent of babble. Even after six months, Alicia could still sometimes throw her into a mental tailspin. She was _sure_ she didn’t remember being like this when she was at that age. Mind you, at her age she had only been ‘her’ for six months, and was still learning from Linith and her mother who ‘she’ really was, this strange not-Alicia they called Fate.

“And Nanoha isn’t here and I would have taken her to Linith but she's not here either and,” Alicia's voice dropped conspiratorially out of her rapid-fire chatter for a moment, “maybe it's _cat_ business!”

Fate looked at her sister in confusion for a second. Then at Vesta. She sighed, and motioned for the kitten-familiar to come closer. Miserably, the little girl did so, her face set in a sullen scowl. She was in her child-form, and looked to be about Alicia’s age.

Sensing that she was no longer needed, Alicia backed out of the room and headed off to play with Arf. Behind her retreating form, Fate patted the padded seat of the swivel chair, pushing it further out from the desk.

“I think there’s some space on here,” she offered. “If you want.”

Vesta didn’t move. She stayed where she was, scuffing an undersized boot against the ground and playing with the hemline of her frock, her eyes glued to the floor. Fate tried another tack.

“You know...” she remarked quietly, “I’ve been missing Nanoha a bit.” She noted Vesta’s ears perk slightly, and continued. “I mean, since I met her we haven’t been apart for very often. I’m feeling a bit lonely without her. I could use a hug to comfort me.”

That got her a glance. “... well,” muttered Vesta grudgingly, “I s’pose if _you_ need comforting...”

Fate hid her smile and nodded seriously, and Vesta trotted over to climb awkwardly up onto the swivel chair, shedding her boots as she did so. Red light glowed for a moment as the shoes dissolved back into mana. It was a little cramped with both of them in the seat – which was large, but not that large – and Vesta wound up half-sitting rather heavily in Fate’s lap with the older girl’s arms around her in a loose hug. But she seemed rather less upset, and that was the important thing.

They sat in companionable silence for a while, Fate idly half-stroking, half attempting to pat down the mad tangle of spiky locks that stuck up in every direction from Vesta’s head, before the catgirl began to speak out of the blue into the crook of Fate’s neck. It was a little hard to make out what she was saying, but Fate listened patiently.

“S’not that I’m _worried_ or anything,” Vesta mumbled. “I mean, mistress is... is _Nanoha_ , she’s not gonna be... be hurt or anything.” Her voice hitched slightly as she finished. Fate declined to comment, and just squeezed her softly. “It’s just... it’s... I haven’t seen her for a whole _week_.”

She squirmed around, turning to look up at Fate miserably. “You know? A-and... and it’ll be another whole week before I can see her again! Or more, even! And if there’s something there then I won’t be able to guard her or shield her and I know Linith is there but she’s not _me_ and she doesn’t know Nanoha like I do and what if she expects me to be there like how we were training to fight together and does something that needs me as well because she forgets and then she gets hurt and it’s...”

She stopped abruptly, blinking and going cross-eyed as she tried to focus on the finger covering her lips.

“Hey now,” Fate soothed her. “No Mistress or Master wants to leave their familiar alone for any length of time. I’m sure Nanoha misses you as much as you’re missing her, and you’ll be back together soon. And Linith will take good care of her in the meantime.” She tickled under Vesta’s chin, producing a surprised purr and a giggle. “Maybe,” she suggested, “you could work on making a surprise of some sort for when Nanoha comes back. That might make the time go a bit faster, right?”

“I guess...” Vesta frowned, a trace of animation coming back to her despondent features. “What kind of thing should I make her, though?”

“Use your imagination! Though...” Fate grimaced, “it might be an idea to check with me before starting once you have an idea. Arf once decided to make me a giant mud pie... I mean, the thought was nice, but the end product wasn’t.” She tilted her head in remembrance. “Especially since she seemed to have entirely the wrong idea about what a mud pie was. Anyway.” She ruffled Vesta’s hair. “The other thing I’d suggest is – Nanoha left you to guard Alicia, didn’t she?”

“Uh huh.” Spiky grey hair bounced wildly as Vesta nodded, and shifted again slightly. Fate tried not to wince. Her leg was going to sleep with Vesta sitting on it like that – for a light-looking little thing, she was certainly heavy enough. Not to mention pointy and hard – all elbows and shoulderblades.

“Well, it’s been getting colder lately. Maybe you should sleep in Alicia’s bed to keep her warm and stop her catching anything. Arf could, too. I’m sure the three of you could play some fun games in your room before going to sleep, too.”

“Yay!” In a flash of light, the girl was gone and a rather-less-upset kitten was eagerly licking her hand and purring up a storm. _‘That’s a great idea!_ she sang excitedly . _‘Alicia was right, you’re smart! Thank you!’_

While Fate appreciated the sudden lack of weight on her leg, she tapped the kitten on the head with a frown. “Vesta,” she reprimanded warningly. “You know you’re meant to stay a little girl. No kitten-form except in practice. Even in the house.”

Another flash of light, and the little girl returned. Fate winced again. Well, at least this time she was on the other leg.

“Sorry,” apologised Vesta in a tone that made it fairly clear that she didn’t really mean it. “I’ll remember next time. But now I need to go and ask Alicia and Arf for ideas on what to make for Nanoha’s coming-back present which will be super-duper-awesome and the best thing ever so thank you again and bye!”

She scurried off. Fate watched her go with an odd smile – Vesta’s rapid twists and turns of emotion were often baffling, but always amusing – and turned back to her desk. She picked up the picture she had been staring at, fingers tapping restlessly against the frame. Her own flushed, laughing face stared back at her, along with Nanoha’s. Her friend had an arm hooked around her neck, with Vesta riding on her head and Arf balancing precariously on their touching shoulders. Fate vaguely recalled that they had all gone tumbling to the floor in a big pile seconds after Linith had snapped the shot. It had taken them nearly ten minutes to get untangled again, mostly because they were laughing so hard.

She couldn’t even remember what they had been laughing at, now.

She had lied to Vesta. Despite the confidence she had displayed for the kitten-girl’s benefit, she was worried. She couldn’t help it. The last time Nanoha had investigated something strange on Earth, it had been... well, her. The Jewel Seeds, at least. And that had sucked them into a month of tense, terrifying and often-painful stress, struggle and strife. It had all turned out for the best – at least for Fate’s family – but Nanoha hadn’t come off so lightly.

And now she was back there again. Investigating something strange and possibly hostile, again. And Fate wasn’t there to help her.

She couldn’t shake a horrible feeling that this wasn’t going to be as simple as a quick reconnaissance and reunion.

...

The transition from mid-morning sun to the middle of the night was a rather jarring one, Linith reflected. But then, sudden shifts in local time were one of the many oddities of world-hopping between Types.

Still, despite the starry night sky above her, Linith was wide awake and refreshed from a good eight or nine hours. So was Nanoha, though the younger girl was waiting behind as Linith disabled the TSAB sensors, quietly wiping their memories of the mana signatures they’d been designed to look for.

 _‘Don’t tell me you’re still sulking,’_ she remarked conversationally. _‘Honestly, Nanoha. Can you really tell me that you don’t feel much better now?’_

Sullen silence answered her. Linith sighed, and rolled her eyes, carefully starting to piece the football-sized sensor back together. She could have just shut it down entirely, but didn’t want to risk the TSAB noticing its removal. No, simply wiping its memory was enough. With no orders to look for any mana signature in particular, it was effectively nullified as a threat. And even if the TSAB came back, they wouldn’t know to check it!

 _‘So, does your mother look well?’_ she enquired cheerfully. _‘Or did something terrible happen to her while you were catching up on sleep?’_ Nanoha had elected to wait at the hospital while Linith disabled the sensors around her family’s house, floating outside her mother’s window with a simple illusion wrapped around her to mask her from view. It wasn’t nearly as elaborate as what Vesta could have done had she been there, cloaking her imperfectly as a heat shimmer and only in the visible wavelengths, but it was enough.

More sulky silence. Then, grudgingly...

 _‘It’s the_ principle _of the thing,’_ Nanoha complained. _‘And you hacked Raising Heart! Traitor!’_ It was hard to tell whether that last was directed at the cat-familiar or the Device in question.

Linith rolled her eyes, fed up. _‘Would this be the principle of overworking yourself until you collapse?’_ she reprimanded her young charge sharply. _‘Or the principle making your mother worry about you being exhausted and barely able to stand at your reunion?_ Her voice softened affectionately. _‘Honestly... you’re as bad as Precia, sometimes. Poor Vesta is really going to have her hands full, looking after you.’_

 _‘... I guess you kind of have a point...’_ Nanoha’s voice was shaded with embarrassment, and Linith guessed that she was blushing. The girl had a tendency to take any comparison to Precia as a compliment, even when it wasn’t intended as one. Still, if it got her to listen and stop sulking, Linith supposed she could let it slide this time.

 _‘Mama looks... well, not okay, obviously. But not bad, either,’_ continued Nanoha, answering Linith’s earlier question. _‘She’s asleep, though, and I don’t want to wake her. She doesn’t seem to have her Device on her, either. I wonder where it is?’_ She paused for a moment. _‘Oh. Huh. Raising Heart says it’s... I think that’s Arisa-chan’s house, from the direction. Maybe she’s using it to practice?’_

 _‘Mmm. Maybe,’_ replied Linith distractedly, focusing on the last tweak of reprogramming the sensor. _‘Aaaand... there we go, done. Alright, your house is clear. Where should I tackle next, your shop? Hmm...’_

 _‘Well, I...’_ started Nanoha, before stopping abruptly. _‘... did you feel that?’_

Linith frowned, swivelling. _‘Feel what? Wait...’_

_‘It’s from over near Arisa-chan’s house... I only felt it because I was already looking there...’_

Shedding her illusion, Nanoha rose up onto the roof of the hospital, tuning Raising Heart to ping Arisa’s Device again. The result that came back made her pale, for more reasons than one.

_‘... barrier. It’s a barrier. Linith, there’s a barrier! Why is there a barrier around... Arisa’s...’_

The question answered itself before she even finished asking it, and she trailed off in horror. _‘I need to...’_

 _‘No!’_ Linith shouted. _‘There’s still a sensor there, I need to disable it first! Nanoha! If it picks you up,_ the TSAB will know! _You_ have _to wait! I’ll disable it as quickly as possible, but promise me you won’t go charging in!’_

Furious silence met her as she threw herself into flight, hoping she would reach the location before Nanoha did. The girl’s previous resentment paled in comparison to this. When the answer finally came, it was tinged with sullen acceptance of Linith’s logic, but she could hear the anger and frustration bubbling below the surface.

_‘Fine. But if she gets hurt, Linith... if it looks like she’s going to be hurt, I’m going in anyway.’_

Snarling into the rushing wind, Linith forbore to reply, and tried to squeeze a few more drops of speed out of her flight spell.

...

Arisa woke up in a cold sweat, wrenched from slumber by something she couldn’t put a name to immediately. She instinctively grabbed for the card that hung from a cord around her neck. She hadn’t taken it off since Momoko had given it to her after Suzuka’s attack, not even in the shower.  
Her form flickered and blurred, resolving in the middle of the room as she activated the spell pre-loaded on it and Ghost Stepped out of bed, stumbling slightly on the carpet and falling over with a clatter.

It wasn’t a comfortable way to wake up. Arisa had called her movement spell ‘Ghost Step’ – which she had invented by combining two of the ones from the book together – because it brought to mind things like ‘cool’ and ‘elusive’ and ‘inexplicable’. It probably was, from the point of view of a normal person watching it, because you just vanished and then appeared somewhere else. From the viewpoint of the person doing it, though, it was more like ‘temporarily going blind because the Device is transmitting all the light around you, get hurled in roughly the direction you wanted, and try to do the numbers in your head which make you brake before landing’.

She was in a position to know. She’d been doing it a lot, recently. Ever since Momoko-sensei had been attacked, she’d been jumpy, nervous. Suzuka-chan being hurt the same way had only elevated it to full-blown paranoia. She had at least managed to get a glimpse of her attacker – a tall, dark figure in strange clothes, carrying a malevolently glowing tome.

Both of them were recovering, albeit slowly. But Arisa knew she was next. It had got to the point where she was Ghost Stepping whenever something startled her and face-planting in the floor whenever she failed to brake properly coming out of it. Which was about two spells in every five. Thankfully, she hadn’t done it in front of anyone other than a few puppies yet, but if the situation continued to fray on her nerves, it was only a matter of time.

And her nerves were certainly frayed now. Blinking in annoyance at the dark room – the glowing numerals of her bedside alarm clock told her it was something like three in the morning – she groped her way over to the door and flicked on the lights.

Nothing happened.

Okay, she told herself, squashing down the fast, shallow flutterings of panic and forcing herself to breathe slowly and normally. So the bulb was blown, or they’d had a power cut. No problem, she’d just open the curtains. Everything was still fine. She wasn’t in any danger, it was just another nightmare or something.

She pulled aside the curtains, letting silvery moonlight fall in through the double-glazed window to flood the room.

And her heart caught in her throat. For the light that shone down on her wasn’t the pale light of the moon. No, it was dark and tinted, a deep violet-grey that bleached the colour of the landscape and lent an eerie sense of wrongness to the familiar lines and curves of her garden. Under the strange colour-shifted sky, every bush seemed to conceal lurking terrors; every hedge was an entry point for sneaking monsters. Arisa choked out a terrified squeak of fright as panic consumed her.

It was the same as that time before.

It was them. The government people that had been fighting Nanoha, who had driven her away – she was sure of it. They had come back and attacked Momoko for helping her, and then Suzuka, and now it was her turn. She trembled like a leaf, eyes wide, breath coming fast and shallow as her pupils shrank down and her vision tunnelled. She tried desperately to cling to rational thought, to force herself to move or run or hide or _something_ other than just stand there like a mouse caught in the eyes of a snake.

Out in the garden, something shifted.

The next minute or so was a series of blurred, tear-stained, panic-ridden jolts as adrenaline flooded into her system and her body took over from her brain. Operating on a mixture of shock and fear, it made full use of the Storage Device around her neck and the spell she had spent the last six months practicing in every spare moment. Rational thought only returned when the latest one in the chain failed – as her spells still often did, even after so much practice – and left her sprawled out on a hard surface, panting like she had just run a marathon.

Struggling to her feet, she tried to get her bearings. She was... she was outside. On the patio behind the house. How had she got all the way down here? She couldn’t remember. She also knew that there was no point in looking for her parents. This was a dimensional barrier – like the one she and Suzuka had been trapped in six months ago, when the sky had caught fire and shattered like glass under a rose-tinted blowtorch.

She had no chance of putting out that much power. And she rather doubted that she could get out of the barrier by trying to Ghost Step through the edge. But her chances of _fighting_ whatever had done this were even closer to zero, and she could only hide for so long – it wasn’t as though they were going to give up and leave. No, the only option she had left was to run for the edge of the barrier and pray that she could slip through somehow. And if she couldn’t...

... well, she’d handle that when she got there. Right now she was pathetically grateful just to have a plan. Clutching the card-form of the Device in a clammy hand, she dithered for a second on which way to go. How far did the barrier extend? Which edge was closest? There was probably a spell to find out, but if so she didn’t know it. She’d have to...

Clink.

The sound came from above and behind. Her nerves already scraped raw, Arisa Ghost Stepped instantly, her image fading as the movement spell caught her up and she shot forward. She landed running, heard a crunch behind her and Stepped again, and again, scrambling and skidding to turn every time she came out to break line of sight. The third left her round the back of the house, and she flung herself into an alcove in the wall and huddled in it, shaking like a leaf.

“Tch...”

Arisa’s trembling ceased. More than that, she froze, petrified. The voice had to have come from less than five metres away. If she poked her head out or made a sound, she was dead.

“This one is good for a rank amateur,” the voice said. It was... strangely light. Female, but more than that, the tone spoke almost of a child, someone her age. There was the slight buzz in her ears which told her the Device was translating for her, that whatever they were speaking, it wasn’t Japanese. But despite its seeming youth, the chilling edge to the voice swamped any hope of mercy. Arisa tried to muffle her gasps for air, wishing she had more mana– she’d already used up half her reserves, and wouldn’t be up to another Ghost Step for several more seconds.

“I've lost her. Moving to reacquire.” Footsteps sounded for a second, then a rustling noise and a rush of air. Wonderful. Whoever the girl was, she could fly. Like Nanoha could. Arisa felt an uncharacteristic pinprick of resentful jealousy towards her friend as she began to shake again, the paralysing terror gone for the moment with the girl’s departure.

But it released the paralysis on her thoughts, as well. Bringing her fist up to her mouth and biting down hard on a knuckle to help her focus, Arisa desperately began to think.

Okay, she thought to herself. Okay. Right. Her plan hadn’t changed. She needed to get to the edge of the barrier. That meant she had to move. Had to get going again. Move. She had to move. She had to stop trembling and breathing hard and imagining whatever that crunching sound behind her had been hitting her head or her legs. She had to move.

She didn’t. Couldn’t. Despite yelling at herself internally, she was frozen to the spot, unwilling to set foot outside the tiny alcove of security that had protected her from her attacker once. She knew it was absurd, but she just couldn’t bring herself to venture out away from the three walls enclosing her like solid guardians.

Something flickered at the edge of her vision. Something red, and glowing. It moved out of her line of sight, then back into view; a golf-ball sized ball of red light that moved purposefully a couple of feet above the ground in a circuit around the house. Even as she registered this, it paused in its searching pattern, and despite the lack of any features, she got the distinct impression it was turning to look at her.

“...!” Arisa squeaked. She knew what the thing was. A search spell. Suzuka could pull off a small one – had done, only a few weeks ago, to find a little origami figure Momoko-sensei had hidden in her living room. Except this wasn’t a small search spell covering one room. This was part of something that probably covered the whole _house_. And now that it had seen her...

Stumbling out of the alcove, Arisa began to run. A whistling sound behind her alerted her to an incoming threat, and she Ghost Stepped forward with so little space to spare that she felt her hair ruffled by the blow as it passed. The sound of splintering wood came as it continued on to hit an ornamental tree, and then something locked up around Arisa’s ankle and send her sprawling.

As she’d half known the second it latched around her foot, it wasn’t anything natural. Her ankle was encased in a red cube that held it firmly in place, no matter how hard she tugged. Scowling, she called up a training shot, resolving to fight. The decision didn’t have much to do with courage – rather, it was more down to the fact that she was immobile, caught in the open and only had enough mana left for two or three more spells. But it was a decision nonetheless.

“Go away!” she shouted. Not the most original battle cry ever devised, but she honestly didn’t care what she sounded like as long as she got out of this alive. She fired even before she finished taking in her assailant’s appearance – a young girl with red hair and sharp blue eyes, wearing an archaic red dress and wielding a vicious-looking hammer. It looked like a Device, too. Whether it was or not, Arisa wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

She didn’t wait to see the amber ball burst against the other girl’s face, making her flinch backwards in annoyance. Even as it struck, she threw half her remaining mana into another Ghost Step, praying that it would work to get her out of the lock on her leg. She felt it slacken as the shot struck home, more from surprise than pain, and combined with the paltry mana she was able to pump into the movement spell it gave, letting her flee back towards the house. Her ankle wrenched as it burst free, but the important thing was that she _was_ free, not sprawled out on the ground and waiting for death.

Limping as fast as she could around a corner and out of sight, she sighted upwards, found an open window and pumped the last dregs of her mana into one last Step, and materialised on the first floor landing outside a row of guest rooms. Still moving. She slammed into the wall, bounced off, hit the ground and lay dazed for a moment before shaking herself awake again. From outside, she caught an angry yell of frustration, but she was too tired to pay attention to that. Panting, she dragged herself into one of the guest rooms and took stock.

Her mana was essentially gone. She might have enough left for another training shot, but even with the Storage Device helping, another Ghost Step was beyond her. She’d need a full night’s sleep before even half her reserves came back, and she wasn’t going to get that.

Physically she was a little better. There was some stinging pain on various parts of her back – when had that happened? A couple of loose splinters answered that question; shrapnel from the impacts of that hammer. And the girl had been swinging that thing at _her?_ Other than that... she was tired, her arms hurt, her legs were burning in a way that told her she wouldn’t be doing much more running around even if she had the energy, her ankle was starting to swell and probably sprained, and she felt sick, light-headed and freezing cold all at once.

But her hands were fine, and her arms weren't too tired. And she _refused_ to just lie down and die. And... oh yes, her Device had a staff form, didn't it? Even if she couldn't use it, that was still a long metal pole. The corners of Arisa's mouth pulled back in what could charitably be called a grin, and realistically be called a grimace. No, she was not going to go down passively. She would resist. She would fight back. She would...

... scream, as the wall exploded.

Bits of rubble and plaster rained down on the room as Arisa cowered. When she felt it safe to look up, she found the red girl floating where the wall had been, scowling angrily.

“Stop _moving_ , dammit!” she yelled angrily. “Urgh, and you don’t even have a Jacket! I swear, what kind of maniac doesn’t use a Barrier Jacket just so they can dodge more? Do you know how _careful_ I’m having to be not to break you? Stay still or I swear I’ll snap your legs, even if you don’t have a Jacket!”

Arisa ignored this tirade, levelled the staff-form of her Device at the girl and fired.

Or tried to, anyway. But even with the Device’s help, the training shot snarled and dissolved, falling apart. Eyes wide as she watched the last of her mana dissipate away into the air, Arisa made a high, wordless sound of protest at the _unfairness_ of the universe making her screw up now, of all times. But whatever else she might be, she wasn’t a quitter. Gathering herself, she growled and launched herself at her enemy in as fast a run as her injured ankle could take her, bringing the staff round in a wild swing.

With a bland expression of annoyance and a total lack of concern, the red-clad girl floated backwards less than ten centimetres, letting the tip of the staff pass a hairsbreadth in front of her nose. And then she swung the hammer, one-handed, a red bubble appearing around its head as time seemed to slow in a way that left Arisa mired in treacle but still able to see what was happening.

The blow was almost beautiful, in a horrible sort of way. It started high, arcing down from Arisa’s left as she brought her staff up in a futile block, and continued clean through the metal pole without impediment before terminating in Arisa’s ribcage. Even through the faintly stunned, briefly painless daze, she noticed that it didn’t _feel_ like a hammer-blow should. It felt... squishy. Like the bubble was made of bubble-wrap, muting the force of the impact to something survivable.

Then time sped up again, and she was sent sprawling backwards into the side of the bed as the two halves of the Storage Device went clattering away into the far corners of the room. Colours dripped and swam across her vision. A high-pitched ringing sound echoed around her head. The air in her lungs seemed to have gone on holiday, and had apparently been replaced in the meantime by a blunt pain that felt a bit like a cymbal must after a particularly hard whack. She was fairly sure she could feel her bones vibrating.

“... ugh...” Arisa wheezed, trying to focus on one of the five girls approaching her. She feebly lifted a hand halfway before the effort got too much for her and it fell limply back to her side.

In response, the red-clad girl stooped down and pulled out her heart.

The mote of light hung in the air like a weak, twinkling star, cradled in the gauntleted hand of the girl in red. Arisa forced out a choked rasp, gaping wide-eyed at the point of light and trying not to faint. There was an aching hollowness in her chest, and it felt like someone had their fingers around all of her internal organs and was _squeezing_ – not enough to hurt yet, just enough to be terrifyingly uncomfortable.

With her other hand, her attacker reached behind her back and produced a book. It glowed with an evil violet light, and Arisa’s eyes widened further. A horrid glowing tome... just like Suzuka had said. She tried to gather the energy to protest, to struggle. Nothing came.

The feeling of her mana being ripped out of her was mercifully brief. That was the only silver lining to it. It felt horrible, nightmarish, like being bled dry from the inside out through a wound that couldn’t be plugged or bandaged. The book drank it in hungrily, devouring every last drop of mana she had in her in seconds – and she could tell that everything she had to offer barely dented its hunger. Writing appeared on its pages as it drank, fading into view as if the ink were rising to the surface of a deep pond, and Arisa’s world began to turn hazy. Words reached her faintly, through the odd buzzing sound that was taking over her hearing.

“... one line? _One measly line?_ Argh! Do you know how much time I wasted on this? I could have got more by hunting wild animals! You! Do you know what you’ve done! You made me waste my time because you just _couldn’t_ sit _still_ like a good girl and went and drained yourself running away! Argh!” She jabbed a finger at Arisa. “Don’t tell anyone else to do this, you hear me! Stupid cowards who spend more energy running than they would fighting back and making it hard for them and me!”

There were more words. But she didn’t really listen to them. She watched the hammer as it rose again, waving wildly as the girl ranted. If it fell again... she wasn’t sure what would happen if it fell again. Her head was all muzzy. But she remembered it would be bad. And then...

... and then...

... and then a ring of amber closed around the hammer, just underneath its head, and stopped it. Even as the girl’s tug on it met resistance, a ball of brilliantly glowing orange smashed into the back of the her head. Arisa blinked.

Had she done that?

No.

There was a figure hovering just outside the ruined wall. Grey-clad, in a uniform that sort of looked like a soldier’s ballistic vest and obscured its figures. It had a helmet, too, a sleek, smooth thing of matte grey that covered its whole head with no openings, and it held a staff with a two-tined steel head. As darkness closed in around the edges of her vision, Arisa groggily wondered how it could see to point the thing.

The figure spoke, in a voice modulated and made as featureless as its appearance by the same technology that disguised its face.

“Get _away_ from my _friend_ ,” it said.

And Arisa had just enough breath left to whisper “... -ha?” before everything turned black.

...

Nanoha hovered in the air, her face hidden behind the opaque face-shield of the helmet. Even though she knew her opponent couldn’t see her expression, she glared. Some things didn’t need eye contact. The red girl glared back, blue eyes narrowing in a way that made her seem almost feral.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, keeping her guard up and Raising Heart levelled in case the girl tried something. “Why are you attacking her?”

The girl didn’t respond. Just glared at Nanoha, her expression both unconcerned and evaluative. The corners of her lips slowly turned up, in a predatory grin.

 _‘Nanoha?’_ Linith asked. She sounded concerned.

 _‘No, stay back,’_ Nanoha thought back quickly. _‘I’ve got this. And it’s best if we stay as secret as possible until we know more about what’s going on, right? If she doesn’t know about you, we should keep it that way for as long as we can.’_

 _‘... alright,’_ Linith agreed reluctantly. _‘But I’m still stepping in if I think it’s needed.’_

 _‘Don’t worry.’_ The girl’s tone was confident. _‘She hurt my friend. I’m not going to lose this.’_

[Beschleunigen!] the girl’s Device barked, dragging her back to reality. It pulsed an angry red as the girl shifted her grip with an ease that spoke of long practice.

With a contemptuous sniff, she wrenched on the Device. The bind Nanoha had placed around it... shattered. She actually felt it break, like fine china under a mallet. Belatedly, she realised that she might be in rather more trouble than she’d anticipated. Shifting into a more tactical mindset, she readied a volley of Divine Shooters, ready to fire at a moment’s notice.

Except she didn’t get a moment’s notice. She didn’t even get a second’s.

[Tödlicher Schlag!]

With a barked command – even her Device sounded angry, a harsh metallic voice that sounded like iron and fury – the girl shot forward. Nanoha silently thanked the countless hours Fate and Linith had spent building on what Miyuki had taught her. Her arms shot into a guard position, bringing Raising Heart around to block and reinforcing it with mana without her even needing to think about it.

Despite the textbook-perfect block and the half-formed barrier she snapped up in the split-second she had, the blow sent her rocketing backwards. The girl was monstrously strong, whoever she was. But the increased distance between them worked to Nanoha’s advantage. As her opponent shot out of the hole in the side of the house, she let fly with the shooting spells she had readied, six bolts of light flashing out as she gained altitude.

But the other girl was evidently almost as fast as she was strong. The hammer whipped out in precise, measured strikes, somehow tracking the blurred paths of the projectiles and snuffing them out one by one. The last three homed in together, and broke against a glowing triangular shield she conjured to meet them. She paused for a second, and the glowing red aura around the head of the hammer spread to the rest of her body, covering her in what looked almost like a fine red mist that clung to her skin and Barrier Jacket.

Then swirls of light appeared around her feet, and she shot towards Nanoha once again – far faster this time, clearly using some kind of movement spell. She wasn’t even trying to dodge, though. Sighting down the length of Raising Heart, Nanoha threw a bind at her, her mind racing. The triangular casting sigil, the emphasis on physical combat... she recognised this from what she’d been taught, both in school and by Precia. This was no Midchildan mage. This was a Belkan knight.

The bind formed... and shattered, almost before it had finished solidifying. The girl’s charge barely even stuttered.

Remembering all too well how formidable the Belkan style was at close range, Nanoha abandoned her offence in favour of putting more distance between them. She turned tail and fled, firing behind her whenever she could get a clear shot. But nothing seemed to work. Binds disintegrated so fast that they barely appeared before breaking. The streams of amber bullets bounced off the scarlet aura. She zigzagged and pinwheeled, trying to shake the girl off, but nothing seemed to deter her.

And she was gaining, metre by metre. Twice already Nanoha had been forced to turn through ninety degrees to avoid the edge of the barrier, allowing her pursuer to cut the corner and gain valuable distance on her – at these speeds, the battlefield was just too small. She stayed alert for a barrier blocking her path or a bind – either would need to be broken immediately if she wanted any chance of staying out of the range of that hammer.

But the end came not from a bind or a barrier. It came from an attack.

The red ball came out of nowhere. The girl must have fired it at some point during the chase, but Nanoha couldn’t say when. The only warning she got was a faint whistle before it came shrilling out of the sky towards her.

“Ahh!”

Nanoha threw herself into a desperate spin to avoid it, pushing herself into a Flash Move to get far enough out of the way. Even with such a rapid response, it missed her by bare centimetres. But the intent had never been to hit her, she knew. The interruption had cost her crucial seconds – crucial seconds that the knight had used to catch up. Spinning around, she brought Raising Heart up to block the attack she knew was coming.

It came alright. But not from where she had been expecting it.

The knight must have risen slightly from where Nanoha had been mentally tracking her, because she was a good metre or so higher than expected. Too late, too slow, she lifted Raising Heart to block. Her Device added its own efforts, activating the auto-defence with a snapped-out [Protection!]

But in the end, even that wasn’t enough.

The blow was slowed by the block, as it swatted Raising Heart aside with such strength that she was barely able to hang onto it with one hand. Cracking the hastily-raised barrier robbed it of yet more force. But though it was slowed and weakened, it wasn’t stopped. The hammer struck dead centre on the brow of Nanoha’s helmet, and stars burst in her eyes in time with an explosion of pain behind them. She reeled backwards, dimly aware of her helmet fracturing and falling away to bare her face. There was a blur of red in front of her, starting to move again...

“Flash... Impact,” she choked out.

She would usually use the melee spell to attack with Raising Heart. But her staff had been knocked aside, held only loosely in her left hand, and bringing it back up again would take too long. So instead, she flooded mana into her fist, and lashed out with every ounce of magically-boosted force she could summon.

The punch caught the other girl full in the jaw with a cringe-worthy sound of breaking bone. It wasn’t just from the knight, either. Both girls reeled for a moment in pain as Nanoha instinctively flew backwards, cradling her hand. Trying to open it only caused it to hurt worse, and she hissed in pain.

[Pain Reduce,] Raising Heart offered, and the throbbing of what were probably broken fingers lessened considerably. [We need to defend, master.]

“I know, I know,” Nanoha muttered, testing her hand. She could move it... barely. But the spell hadn’t healed the damage, only dulled the pain – it still hurt, and she could only manage a weak grip on the staff. She would have to compensate for that in the next round of attacks. The knight looked like she had recovered from the impact as well, so Nanoha started backing off again, while dredging her arsenal for something to finish the fight with. Binds wouldn’t hold her, ordinary shots weren’t enough, there was nowhere near enough time to charge up a bombardment attack...

... ah. Yes. That would do nicely.

Raising Heart sped through the calculations as Nanoha drew to a halt and threw an alarmingly large chunk of her flagging reserves into the spell. She was tired – tired from travelling, tired from the week of teleporting, tired enough that it was sapping at her reflexes and draining her strength. Even the full night’s sleep she had got wasn’t enough to offset it, though without that she would probably be dead already. She knew she couldn’t hold out much longer. If this didn’t finish things, she would need to call for Linith or flee.

So it would _have_ to finish things. She wouldn’t allow it not to. The scarlet knight seemed to have the same thought. She swooped in low, her Device shifting forms as she did. A vicious looking spike slid out from one face of the hammer, even as the other one opened up to reveal a rocket booster. She charged with frightening speed, showing the same casual disregard for evasion or caution that she had for the whole fight, the rocket spitting fire as she hefted it aloft.

Nanoha stood her ground above a blazing circle, as she deployed the reactive barrier that Precia had taught her. It shimmered into view, draining her reserves to manifest as a tessellated shield of woven light. Just in case, she layered another barrier beneath it, twice as strong as the hasty one the girl had shattered earlier. Even if she managed to break the reactive overlayer and survive the blast, this one would stop her cold.

But as the girl drew up, something happened. An explosion partway down her Device, like a shell slamming home in the barrel of an artillery piece. The mana pouring off the thing spiked – Nanoha could _feel_ it, even behind her barriers. The sudden surge of power was incredible. The hammer swung down...

And a blast of amber fire engulfed the girl, even as the reactive barrier shattered. Nanoha screamed at the feedback – that blow was far, far too strong. Horrifyingly strong. Whether it was the explosion or the rocket-form, the girl’s piercing power had risen exponentially. The second barrier wouldn’t be enough. Helplessly, she lifted Raising Heart and pushed herself backwards in a futile attempt to deflect the blow.

The spiked head of hammer, still wreathed in amber fire but undamaged, broke the second barrier with a scream like tearing metal. It struck Raising Heart on one of the two tines of its shooting form, snapping it off cleanly and taking a chunk out of the ruby-red core as it continued down towards Nanoha herself...

Impact.

Pain.

... warmth?

Nanoha forced her eyes open. Someone had snatched her away. Linith? It had to be. They were retreating, at speeds that she hadn’t known the cat-familiar was capable of, but she could still see her opponent. There was something hurtling towards her, something huge... it looked like a tree.

It was, in fact, a tree.

The girl wrenched free of the tan binds that had cocooned her, and brought her hammer round in a furious slash, defending against the huge mass at the last second. It struck the falling log with a crack that Nanoha heard even from a distance, splitting it in clean in two.

It was a mistake. Linith was good at trap spells, and that log must have had at least half a dozen on it. An opaque, bubble-shaped barrier surrounded the girl’s head the second her hammer hit wood, and a binding ring of the same colour flashed into being around her throat and began to constrict. The two halves separated just enough to pass her by on either side as she flailed briefly.

Then they exploded.

Even that wasn’t enough to put her down, Nanoha saw. As the smoke cleared, she remained standing. Her Barrier Jacket was scorched and damaged, far more than it had been by the blast from Nanoha’s barrier, but it hadn’t been broken. But Linith hadn’t stopped there, it seemed, either. Though her vision was blurry, Nanoha could see a swarm of tiny shapes whirling around the beleaguered form, hammering at the knight relentlessly as she brought her hands up towards her neck.

And then there was a wrenching shift, and they were outside the barrier again, still accelerating. Another jolt, almost before the first had faded, and this time Nanoha recognised the distinctive flavour of a teleport spell, taking them far, far away from the girl. Despite the humiliation of her loss, Nanoha had to breathe a sigh of relief at that.

She didn’t get to see where they had teleported to, though. Her eyes fluttered closed as they arrived, as the slap-dash anaesthetic spell wore off and raw agony from her hand assaulted her again. Not just her hand, either. Her ribs, her head... it seemed like there wasn’t any part of her that didn’t hurt, ache or burn.

A spark of magic entered her system, telling it to sleep. Linith again, lowering her onto a bed. Thank goodness.

Fleeing from the pain and the sting of her defeat, Nanoha yielded to the spell gratefully. She was unconscious before her head hit the pillow.

...


	3. Chapter Two

“... almost like the Breaker, which worries me. I would advise...”

Words floated down to her as consciousness returned slowly. Nanoha rather wished it hadn’t, because it brought quite a lot of pain with it, mostly centred on her ribs and hand. The latter felt hot and itchy, like there was something prickling uncomfortably beneath the skin. She tried to move it, only to discover that it was bound in place by something.

“Stop that,” said a voice from somewhere above her. Blinking, Nanoha tried to focus, but her vision was still fuzzy from sleep. As she waited for it to clear, she took stock of her position.

She was lying down. On a bed, from the feel of it, propped up by pillows. Her head hurt. Her ribs _really_ hurt. Her right arm was stretched out to the side, supported by some sort of binding, and her hand ached and prickled horribly. It alternated between uncomfortably hot and painfully cold, reminding her vaguely of the few times she’d got sick or had fevers when she was younger. Or... oh dear. The way her first meeting with Fate had ended.

“Wh...” she mumbled, uncertain if she was asking ‘what’, ‘where’ or ‘why’.

A cool hand rested on her forehead, stroking her hair gently. The pain receded into the distance, though the discomfort stayed. More importantly, her vision finally came into focus, resolving to show Linith leaning over her. The older woman looked concerned, motherly and more than a little exasperated.

“I said stay _still_ , Nanoha,” she repeated, and the girl belatedly realised that she was still tugging on whatever was holding her arm in place. She stopped sheepishly and glanced over at it. And winced. Her hand was nastily swollen, and suspended off the edge of the bed in a ball of tan light that pulsed busily. She remembered the crack as she’d hit the red girl’s jaw, and guessed that she’d probably broken a few fingers doing so. From the feel of it, her middle and ring fingers were the worst off. She tentatively tried to flex them, and was rewarded with a fresh stab of pain.

“Nanoha, if you keep doing that, I will paralyse your whole arm until it’s healed,” stated Linith, narrowing her eyes dangerously. “Stay still and let it heal. I know it’s uncomfortable, but as long as you let the spell work, your bones should have knitted together enough to be functional within four days or so. Though you’ll still need to be careful for another week after that.” She glanced down. “Your ribs, unfortunately, aren’t as easy to care for. On the other hand, they’re not as badly hurt, either. No broken bones; your Barrier Jacket absorbed most of the impact that shattered it. They are rather severely bruised, though.”

She pursed her lips. “All in all, you should be back to normal two weeks from now. And no, I’m not letting you dive back into combat before then.”

Nanoha scowled at her mulishly. “If my friends and family are...” Her eyes widened. “Arisa-chan! She...”

Linith covered her lips with a finger, hushing her. “Yes, the knight drained her. She’ll recover, though. I checked up on her after I got you here, she’s in hospital, but not seriously hurt.”

“She’s in...” Nanoha’s brow creased. “Wait, how long has it been? And... where are we?” She looked around the room, confused. It was plain, with a chest of drawers and a wardrobe against the wall to her left and a desk on the opposite side of the room, facing a window that looked out onto what looked like a part. A couple of pictures hung on the walls – one of which she recognised as a painting of the harbour. “Are we still on Earth?”

“Yes,” Linith nodded. “I booked us into a hotel last night, after you’d gone to sleep. After all, I was the one who arranged those things for Fate last time, so I know a little about how your world does things. That’s where we are now. We’re about twenty minutes’ walk from the penthouse you stayed at last time you were here, actually. Though I’m afraid our lodgings aren’t quite as luxurious this time. And it’s been six hours since we got away.” She grimaced. “I haven’t had time to send a report back to Precia yet. I was just starting on that... but now that you’re awake, I wanted to talk to you about the knight first.”

“Knight... the mage! With the hammer! Did she... she...”

“I don’t believe she followed us,” Linith said gravely. “I... slowed her down, I hope, and then took a rather evasive route here.”

“A knight... so she was a Belkan-user, then?” Nanoha asked, her rhetorical question still slightly slurred. “I thought so. And... that was a cartridge system, wasn’t it? That sudden boost. I’ve read about them, but... aren’t they like magic batteries? No, the other word, the thingies which aren’t quite batteries but also store power.” She looked down at her ribs and winced. “It worked, whatever it was. I don’t know if I could have stopped it even if I’d known it was coming,” she added in a mutter.

“I didn’t catch as much of the fight as you did, though I’ve looked at the logs on Raising Heart – which is here, by the way.” Linith pointed to the red jewel on the bedside cabinet to Nanoha’s left.

Nanoha looked over at her partner and felt tears come to her eyes. There was an ugly crack running down the centre of Raising Heart’s jewel form, and she could see that several chips were missing entirely.

“Raising Heart...” she whispered, her voice catching. “Can... can I hold her?” Linith touched her shoulder gently.

“It’s not damaged beyond repair. I’ll see what I can do for it after we’ve contacted Precia.” She pressed her lips together. “And she needs to be alerted to this. That knight was AA-rank at least, perhaps more. And that weapon almost reminded me of...” She tailed off, looking pensive before passing the Device to Nanoha..

The girl stared down at her... at her friend, rubbing the thumb of her mobile hand over the crack. It felt like... like someone had deliberately gone out to target her in particular. They’d gone after her mother, after her friend, and they’d damaged Raising Heart. That mysterious girl-knight, who looked to be even younger than her, with her hammer had stolen Arisa’s core! A core-stealing knight with a hammer...

The thought sparked Nanoha to recall what she’d heard before waking up properly. And that in turn triggered another memory. “Wait!” she said urgently, holding up her uninjured hand and sitting up straighter. The cat-familiar half turned, from where she had been going over the footage again. “Linith, please, wait! Wait... I remember something about this. A story... Raising Heart? Can you still...”

[I can function, my master,] tolled the gem. Or tried to. The pleasant female voice wobbled a little as it spoke, crackling slightly and making it difficult to make out one or two of the words. Nanoha felt a lump rise into her throat again at the damage her partner had received.

“Raising Heart...” she murmured again, touched by the Device’s loyalty. Then she shook herself, remembering what had occurred to her. “Search... about a month ago, for ‘Breaker’, ‘Belkan’ and... uh... ‘hammer’. I’m sure I remember seeing something like that, I just can’t place what it was...”

[13,000 plus hits on internal database, my master. Sorting by order of relevance. First on list; Class 1 Lost Logia: Book of Darkness,] Raising Heart informed her. [Cloud Knights: Blade, Breaker, Healer, Hound.]

Nanoha went very still. “... yes,” she said faintly. “Yes, that was it. A Lost Logia... a _Class 1_ Lost Logia? Here?!” She struggled to straighten up further, using both arms to lever herself vertical. “It drained mana, too, I remember reading that! And... and okay, not much else, but I remember it’s bad! Really bad! Linith, we have to...”

Linith flicked a hand at her, and a tan bolt shot into Nanoha’s right shoulder. Her entire arm promptly went dead, encased in a faintly glowing sheath that held it rock-still, and she crashed over sideways onto the mattress. Thankfully, the covers and the pillows absorbed most of the impact, and her ribs only twinged a little. Nonetheless, Nanoha felt it appropriate to give a muffled “ow” into the pillowcase, and did so.

Before she could get angry – either about being cut off, or about the fact that she could no longer feel her arm – Linith gently rolled her back over. She was giving Nanoha a kind, but stern look, which told the girl that arguing would not be a good idea at this point.

“Nanoha,” she said firmly. “I did warn you. Now, hopefully that will convince you not to go charging into things until you’re better. And as for the Book of Darkness...” She sighed. “The thought had occurred to me, too. But honestly, I don’t think it’s very likely at all. Think about it, Nanoha. We’re on the edge of TSAB space here. Border raids are common. And there are thousands, millions of Belkan knights out there. Core-ripping technology...” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Well, it’s distasteful, but it’s hardly unheard of. And there’s no end of unscrupulous people looking for quick routes to power. But in all the Dimensional Sea, there is only one Book of Darkness. Just one, against the thousands of other possibilities. Raising Heart, please list the next entries.”

[Second on list; Sankt Kaiser Wilhelm II, aka ‘the Breaker’ or ‘the Hammer of Waalune’. Third on list; the Fifth Royal Belkan Dragoons, nicknamed ‘the Steel Hammers’. Fourth on list; Class 2 Lost Logia: the Lucrezian Hammer. Corpses reanimated by Lost Logia are referred to as ‘Breakers’ from their anti-Barrier capacities. Fifth on list...]

“That’s enough, Raising Heart,” Linith said. She smiled patiently, stroking Nanoha’s hair out of her eyes and hushing her as she tried to protest. “I know it seems like it fits, sweetheart, and I will definitely mention the possibility to Precia. But in all likelihood, I think we’re probably dealing with a Belkan knight – or perhaps a group of them – who are after power for something. They may even be emulating the weapons of the Cloud Knights to boost their reputation. It wouldn’t be the first time that a group had tried something like that, not by a long shot.”

“She was powerful, though,” argued Nanoha, unwilling to give up on her theory so easily. “And that other one, the L-word hammer thing... that’s bad too!”

Linith shrugged.

“There are plenty of powerful mages, though I’ll grant that they’re rarer in backwaters like this one. Still, you’re living proof that they still happen. And really, given the numbers, isn’t it more likely that it’s a group of copycats than the real Book of Darkness? You get quite a few of them. There are even imitations made to try to copy its power to steal power, and none of them are as powerful as the original.”

Sullenly, Nanoha conceded the point with a nod. Linith’s smile widened. “Well then. Actually, you know, with the core-draining... that girl wasn’t TSAB. What she was doing is illegal under their laws; they would try to arrest her if they knew. We could even set one of their sensors to alert them without letting them know we were here, and just let them come and handle it...”

She left the question hanging tentatively in the air. Nanoha’s stubborn stare cut it down and trampled on it. Sighing, Linith gave another shrug. “Well, it was worth asking. I’ll go and start compiling a message for Precia. You can add your own perspective to it once I’m done. Alright?” She rose from her seat and walked over to the door. Pausing just before leaving the room, she turned back. “Oh, and Nanoha?”

“Uh huh?”

“Don’t strain yourself, do you understand? Focus on resting and healing. And call me if you need anything, okay?” Linith smiled warmly. “Then maybe if you’re feeling better later on, we can go and visit your family. Okay?” With a twirl of skirts, she disappeared into the adjacent room, leaving Nanoha alone.

The girl waited a few moments to be sure that she’d really left. She didn’t have any intention of violating Linith’s orders – if nothing else, there wasn’t much she could do with a paralysed arm, save perhaps pick at the spell and try to work out how it functioned.

But despite the familiar’s logic and reassurances, Nanoha still had a seed of doubt about their opponents. And there was one thing she could do that was no strain at all. After all, Linith hadn’t told her not to do _that_.

“Raising Heart?” she asked quietly. “If you can still work, where’s the nearest server in TSAB space? Not a military one, just one that’d let me find out more.”

The Jewel pulsed for a moment before replying. [Nearest major server located thirty light-minutes away, master. I am functional.]

Nanoha nodded, shifting in bed to sit up further. She awkwardly propped herself up with a pillow so that she didn’t slide back down again. “Okay. Look up everything you can about the Book of Darkness, please. Hide the request, too. Curve the signal so they can’t straight-line it back to the source. I don’t think anyone would notice one little ping on a major server, but I don’t want Linith any more mad at me for being careless.”

[Alright, my master. Preparing query and defensive protocols.]

“Thank you.” Nanoha smiled. “Now, while we’re waiting for that to be ready... dictation mode, please. Start a message to Fate, Vesta and Arf. Message begins: Hi everyone. I’m afraid there’s been a small incident...”

...

Elsewhere in the city, a blonde woman sat in the living room of a pleasant two-storey house. She was nestled comfortably in an armchair; her long skirt spread neatly and her head bent low over a small cylinder which she held encased in a soft green glow between her hands. The magic filtered slowly into the tiny casing, settling into the high-density storage medium to wait until it was released again.

A faint bump came from upstairs. The woman’s ears twitched at the sound, though she paid it little conscious attention. It was probably her associate, though the other woman was normally more graceful than that.

The call that followed, however, was not ignored.

_‘Shamal? The lights are on. Is the mistress awake?’_

Frowning, the blonde glanced up from her work for a second. _‘Vita?’_ she asked distractedly. _‘I thought you were still out. Hold on...’_ The last few drops of magic she was feeding into the cartridge trickled in to fill it to its capacity, and she spun her finger around it, sealing the capsule. That done, she settled it on the table beside the five she had already finished with a faint clink, and stretched. _‘Alright, I’m done. And no, Hayate went to bed hours ago. Zafira is with her.’_ She looked up, frowning. _‘Wait, are you on the roof again?’_ she asked, a little wearily.

 _‘Yes. You need to come up. I need healing, and... hmm. Actually...’_ Shamal felt the faint echo-shift that signalled Vita expanding her telepathy to address multiple people, _‘Signum, Zafira, you should come up here too. We may have a problem.’_

Intrigued, Shamal rose, and made her way upstairs. She met Signum on the landing as the pink-haired knight came out of her own room, ponytail swishing behind her. From the light shirt and trousers she was wearing, Shamal guessed that she’d been doing practicing sword forms in the limited space she had. She crooked an eyebrow at her fellow knight, glancing upwards in a silent question. Signum just shrugged.

 _‘Zafira?’_ she sent, looking over at the door to their mistress’s room. _‘Are you coming?’_

 _‘I’ll stay down here with Hayate,’_ came the reply from the last member of their quartet. _‘I’ve opened the window a little, I should be able to hear you just fine from down here. Keep your voices down so you don’t wake her, though.’_

Following Signum up to the roof, Shamal climbed up onto the slates, stumbling slightly as her skirt caught on the top of the ladder. “Alright then, let’s have a look at... you... oh. Oh my.” She raised a hand to her mouth, surprised.

Signum’s eyebrows had risen at the sight of Vita’s state, too, before narrowing into a frown of disapproval. The smaller knight’s jaw was swollen and hung open slightly, clearly broken. A ring of livid bruises lined her throat, and her Knight’s Garb was scorched, singed and cracked in several places. Even Graf Eisen was soot-stained. She held the simulacra-copy of the Book she had taken with her on her hunt, but it held none of the crackling power that marked a successful night’s work.

She also looked nothing short of _furious_.

 _‘Don’t. Start.’_ she growled. _‘I know already. I was careless. But it wasn’t an ordinary target. We have a problem.’_ She glanced at Shamal, her expression fading slightly into embarrassment, and not a little discomfort. _‘Hayate... probably shouldn’t see this. And I wanted to get the healing done as fast as possible, so I didn’t risk mucking things up for you with a clumsy try. Can you... ah...’_

“Yes, yes, of course.” Shamal shuffled closer, and applied a green-glowing hand to Vita’s jaw. The sharp crack of resetting bone echoed nastily across the rooftop, and Vita winced.

 _‘Ow,’_ she commented dryly.

But Signum was unmoved by the remark, already focused on other things. “You said you were going after a weak signal,” she mused. “What put you off-guard enough for this to happen?”

Vita’s eyes were narrowed as Shamal tended brusquely to her jaw and throat, the older woman holding her head still as she worked. _‘Someone interfered. Probably an offworlder. If nothing else, the Device she was using was cutting-edge – a newer model than anything we saw even _last_ time we were active, and... Graf Eisen, replay footage.’ _The hammer pulsed, and a window opened above it, displaying the footage of the hunt and subsequent fight from Vita’s point of view.

Shamal watched out of a corner of her eye as she did what she could to reduce the swelling and smooth over the bruises. Even with the resilience of a mana construct and what healing she could provide, the damage to Vita’s structure wouldn’t be possible to conceal completely. There just wasn’t time for it all to heal naturally. She focused on the neck first – if needs be, they could always pass a swollen jaw off as the result of a misaimed croquet mallet. Strangulation would be harder to explain away. It wasn’t a full break, which was fortunate, just a nasty dislocation and a hairline fracture.

She sighed. No doubt she would be the one making excuses to Hayate again. She never enjoyed lying to the girl about what they were doing – none of them did, but it fell on her the most. But it was for their master’s own good, in the end. If she knew what they were doing, she would forbid them from continuing. And the results of _that_ were unthinkable.

 _‘You’re right about the Device,’_ commented Zafira from below. _‘That looks like... hmm. Pause it?’_

The image obligingly froze. Shamal could hear the shift in tone to interest and analysis, and hid a smile. _‘Yes,’_ he continued, _‘looking at it... let me see. Vita, if I could access the screen?’_ The frozen image centred on the attacker’s staff shrank, and a series of other models appeared beside it. Zafira rumbled quietly, scrolling through them remotely. _‘Hmm. It looks like a progression of the Sterrina series. Military, and not standard issue. Possibly some kind of specialist, though I couldn’t make a guess as to what. Well... bombardment or sealing, perhaps, from the head flange shape. Almost certainly TSAB, though.’_

“So this... girl, from her figure, she did this?” Signum asked. Vita shook her head, wincing again as the movement jarred her jaw. Shamal frowned at her disapprovingly and started work on the dislocation.

 _‘Uh... sorry Shamal,’_ Vita apologised, and looked back at Signum. _‘No,’_ she clarified, _‘it wasn’t the girl who did this. She had an ally. Keep watching.’_

Signum’s face remained impassive as the brief tussle ran its course. Her eyes narrowed slightly as the girl’s face was revealed, but she made no sound until the sudden, jarring explosion of tan light blotted out the screen and it dissolved into frenzied movement and chaos for a few moments, resolving only after the girl had disappeared.

“Hmm,” she said in a tone which Vita knew from experience meant her mind was whirring through possibilities. “What was it? That spell at the end.”

 _‘Trap, I think. You saw the thing that came at me? It was... I think it was most of a tree, with half a dozen trap spells layered on it. And they slapped a few binds on me, too. Not just to hold me still, either. That choke bind they used, the one that did this...’_ she gestured at her mostly-healed throat, and Shamal firmly pushed her hand back down out of the way again. Undeterred, Vita continued, _‘if I’d been human, that would have broken my neck. They went straight to lethal, no warning shots or anything. By the time I’d recovered, they were gone. I don’t think they’re TSAB, whoever they are.’_

“I agree,” Signum nodded. “She was wearing no uniform, she didn’t announce herself or try to arrest you and her ally went straight to lethal. Odd. A TSAB Device, but a completely different methodology... go back to the girl’s face again? It seemed familiar somehow.”

The image rewound, and expanded again to show the face of a young girl, screwed up in pain. The shattered remains of a full-face helmet were dissipating from around her head, allowing her hair to escape in wispy strands.

The three of them stared at it blankly for a moment. Shamal slowly raised a finger. “She does look... hmm. You’re right, I’ve seen her before. Where, though...” She pursed her lips, thinking hard. “Zafira? Any ideas?”

 _‘Can’t say she rings any bells,’_ came the low voice from below. _‘You spend more time out and about than I do, though. Perhaps she has relatives in this region? That might explain why she was here.’_

“Relatives... hah,” Signum snapped her fingers suddenly, drawing two pairs of eyes to her. Below them, a canine head turned to look at the ceiling in curiosity. “That’s it. I know what she reminds me of,” she continued. “The woman from two weeks ago. The one who tried to fight back.” Her eyes clouded slightly. “An _odd_ fighting style, too. It reminded me of... edge people over the years. Old styles. The bastardised ones from worlds which’d encountered a few Belkan spells, but not got the underlying principles. Used with only partial understanding, but with natural talent. The pseudo-formalised styles of Venafira and Irr Naluim and their war-priests...” she shook her head, aware that she had drifted away from the topic, and dismissed the thought. “Anyway. This girl looks very similar. A daughter, perhaps?” She frowned. “But using a TSAB Device and style... Vita, you said this girl was powerful? How powerful?”

Shamal released the young redhead, who considered the question, rubbing her jaw gingerly. “Pretty strong,” Vita eventually decided, speaking softly with a faint rasp. “Lots of mana to work with, certainly. I made fairly short work of her once I caught up, but... I’d say AA-rank? Maybe a little higher. It was hard to tell, the fight didn’t last long. And her style was very Mid; she’d have been able to keep range much better had we not been in such a small barrier.”

A cool night breeze stirred the long pink ponytail as Signum nodded. “The mother was magically powerful as well; four and a half pages. Not much evidence, but it lends a little support to the possibility. Assuming she’s even local.”

“She did mention that my target was her friend,” Vita pointed out. “She seemed angry about it, certainly.” She snorted angrily. “Can’t imagine why. The girl was only worth one measly line. All that effort for practically nothing, it’s ridiculous.”

“Ah, I’m sure you’ll have better luck next time, Vita,” Shamal lightly teased, smiling. “But what does this leave us with? A young girl, magically powerful, possible local family... might this be connected to whatever happened before we were summoned? Hayate-chan did say that there were two young mages during that business at the hospital...”

 _‘_ Something _certainly happened around that time,’_ Zafira agreed cautiously. _‘ The quake, if nothing else. But I don’t think we can draw any links to this, not without a lot more evidence. I’ll look into the news from around that time and see if I can pin down anything more concrete. Until then, Signum? How shall we respond?’_

Not for nothing was Signum the Wolkenritter’s general. She breathed out slowly, considering. “She’ll almost certainly try to interfere again,” she thought aloud. “Either for moral reasons or revenge, I can’t see anyone willing to attack like that just giving up after one fight. More so if she knows our history.” Her hand strayed to her hip, feeling instinctively for the hilt of a sword that wasn’t there. “With the level of skill she displayed against Vita, I doubt she poses a significant threat at the moment. Her ally, on the other hand...”

She leaned back and stared up at the night sky reflectively. “Yes,” she decided. “We should probably remove her from the playing field, one way or another. An intensive draining would probably keep her in hospital until everything is over, one way or another. And pay her back in part for trying to kill one of our number.” She glanced at Shamal out of the corner of her eye. “Just be sure not to kill her. We may be violating the spirit of her orders, but we will not violate the letter.”

...

The door to the Takamachi household looked just the same as she remembered. The damage from that night so long ago when she had fled had been patched up, the holes in the wall filled and the window fixed. She’d thought that it would seem different, that the months she’d spent away would have changed it, or her, or both, to the point where it would seem strange or odd or unfamiliar. But it didn’t. Nostalgia flooded her as she walked up the familiar path, like a well-fitted glove slipping comfortably back onto her hand.

And the porch light was on.

Somehow, that was the thing that hit home the strongest. Whenever Shiro or Kyouya – or later Miyuki, as she’d grown up – had been out late at work or with friends, Nanoha’s parents would always leave the light on until they got back, to welcome them in when they returned. The few times she’d been the last to come home, coming back late from evening birthday parties or after-school clubs or projects, it had been there for her, too.

And it was there for her now.

Had it been shining there every night since she’d left, waiting for her to come home? The thought made a lump rise in Nanoha’s throat, and her eyes grew watery. Linith’s hand rested on her shoulder in gentle support, and her shaky breathing steadied out again. She was determined not to cry. She had things to talk about, months to catch up on, experiences to share. She definitely would not break down crying!

Taking a deep breath, she walked up to the door and knocked. And waited.

After a pause, it became evident that the door wasn’t going to be answered. She looked questioningly at Linith, and though she couldn’t see them under the familiar’s illusionary disguise, she knew that the sensitive feline ears were twitching, listening for sounds from within. After a moment’s silent concentration, Linith shook her head.

“Nobody’s home,” she shrugged. “Not even a pet. Is there a spare key anywhere?”

“Um... yeah, if they haven’t moved it.” Nanoha frowned as she carefully felt under the flowerpots on the windowsill. Her questing fingers soon found the small, hard shape of the key attached to the underside of one of the heavier ones, and she pulled it out triumphantly. “Here we go. Come on, they shouldn’t mind us going in, I hope.”

Opening the door with just her left hand was tricky, but she managed it. Inside, the hall was dark, only dimly lit by the sodium glow of the streetlamps from outside filtering in through the windows. Nanoha’s hand instinctively went to the light-switch, before halting uncertainly. How would her family react to arriving home and finding the lights on, with what to them would be a stranger in their house? Should she drop the illusionary disguise, or keep it up and just explain things to them instead?

... she wanted her family to see the real her, not a fake face. And it _was_ probably safe to unmask here. Probably.

Still, there was no need to alarm them as they arrived. “We should leave the lights off,” she said out loud, for Linith’s benefit. “Papa will be suspicious if they arrive back and the lights are on, and... I don’t want my reunion to go like that.”

“Of course, sweetheart,” Linith agreed. “Do you have any idea when they’ll be back? Or where they are?” Nanoha shook her head, and Linith hummed reflectively. “Well then, why don’t you show me around?” she suggested. “I know Fate has visited here once, but I’ve never seen your family home before. I must say, it’s rather pretty.”

“Ah! Yes! Okay, we should start with the kitchen, then. That’s where the calendar is, it might say where they are.” A smile formed on her face as Nanoha led the way down the corridor, the illusion dissolving from around her as she spoke.

“Okay, this bit here is the family room, but I’ll show you that a bit later. And don’t look at me like that, we’re safe in here, and I want to see my family looking like me. Now, the kitchen is through... here.” Conjuring a ball of pink light to guide her way Nanoha pushed the door open, slightly apprehensive of what she might find. Would anything have changed?

It hadn’t. She let the ball of light float up to hang over her shoulder, as she couldn’t hold it and still have a free hand simultaneously. Bathed in the pink light, the kitchen was just as she remembered it – so very vividly – that last time she’d seen it, coming in to talk to her mother before Fate had arrived on that rain-soaked night. The surfaces were more cluttered than usual – Momoko’s absence taking its toll on the family’s energy. But the dishwasher was running quietly, she noted, so her family couldn’t have been gone for too long. She sniffed tentatively, and a fragile smile blossomed as she caught the mingled scents of the herbs that her mother grew in pots next to the windows. Vesta would like it in here, she thought. So many interesting smells. And food, too. The thought made her giggle slightly, then sniff. It was surprisingly lonely without the crazy little furball rubbing against her ankles or perching on her shoulder, chattering away.

But despite the painful swell of familiarity, homesickness and loneliness, she wasn’t here to reminisce. “Th... the calendar is over here,” she told Linith, stuttering a little over the lump that was still lodged in her throat. “Hang on, I’ll just...”

Glancing over the calendar hanging from the fridge door, she found the usual miscellaneous notes about appointments, outings and bookings, along with the mess of notes, receipts and letters paperclipped to the sides. But what caught her attention was the row of crossed out days leading up to the current one, which was circled several times. Frowning, she ran her finger back to the day it started and asked Raising Heart to do a quick conversion to confirm what she already suspected. It was the day just before she had scryed on her mother and found her in hospital.

“Linith?” she called. The cat, who had been sniffing interestedly at what Nanoha thought was probably either the mint or the mitsuba. “Come see this. I...” she bit her lip. “I think today _might_ be when mama gets out of hospital.”

Linith blinked, examined the calendar, and smiled in confusion. “Well isn’t that a good thing?” she asked. “They might even be going to pick her up now!”

“But...” Nanoha was looking down now, scuffing her foot on the ground and making a detailed examination of the kitchen floor. “I’m not sure what I’ll... I haven’t seen them in so long, and...”

Linith knelt down and hugged her, purring reassuringly. Nanoha relaxed – it was impossible not to, in a Linith-hug. She wasn’t sure how the human-form’s vocal chords made that sound, but it reminded her of Vesta, and was wonderfully comforting.

“You’ll be fine,” promised Linith. “The moment they see you, they’ll all hug you until you nearly burst, and shower you with questions about what you’ve been up to and how much you’ve learnt. Which reminds me. I don’t want you jarring that hand when they do.” She frowned slightly, standing up, and clicked her fingers. The faint tan shimmering holding Nanoha’s hand still flared briefly, extending up her arm and covering her arm up to the elbow in what looked like a little like a cast made of mana. She tested it gingerly, and found it completely immobile.

“None of that,” scolded Linith, poking her in the elbow. The arm went dead below the joint, and Nanoha vaguely wondered if that had been magic or some kind of secret cat pressure point. Vesta could certainly send her legs to sleep when she curled up on them. Maybe it was a special feline skill? She’d have to find out how it was done.

“Well... um...” She was smiling shyly though, the moment of uncertainty broken by Linith’s warmth. “I should... keep looking. For stuff. And showing you around, I still haven’t...”

She trailed off, because she had just noticed what was hanging on the other side of the fridge door. In a faint daze, she reached out and hooked a finger through the pink ribbon, lifting it off the hook and examining the card-like shape hanging from it. It was clear glass, or plastic, and about the same size as the card-Devices she’d seen schoolmates use back on Schzenais.

But it wasn’t a Device.

It was a pressed flower.

Her eyes suddenly felt very watery, and her vision was all blurred all of a sudden. Which wasn’t crying, because she’d promised herself very definitely that she wasn’t going to cry and that she was going to be grown-up and mature about things, and not burst into tears. She was just feeling... wobbly, for a moment, and had to sit down. That was all.

“Nanoha? Nanoha, what’s that you’ve got there, you’re holding it hard enough that your hand is... oh. Oh dear.”

She vaguely felt Linith pull up a chair and sit down beside her, folding her into another hug and stroking her hair gently. She didn’t say anything, just offering silent support while Nanoha stared at the little flower. The one she had given to her mother, the last time she’d met her in person.

“They miss me too, don’t they?” she mumbled in a small voice, croaking. “As much as I miss them. I must’ve been making them worry so much...” She had known intellectually that her family would be thinking of her as much as she thought of them, but it hadn’t really hit home until she saw it first-hand. The porch light; left on night after night for a wayward daughter whose location they didn’t know. The forlorn little flower; pressed and beribboned and left hanging where Momoko would see it every day.

Suddenly, Nanoha struggled out of Linith’s embrace, and dashed for the stairs. She had to see her room, had to see what it was like. If they had...

... well, she wasn’t sure what she was expecting. Or hoping for. Or dreading. She fumbled the door open, clumsy with her left hand, and closed her eyes as she stepped in, drawing breath sharply. She could hear Linith running up the stairs behind her, but ignored the sound in favour of slowly opening her eyes and inspecting the room.

The jolt of familiarity was barely noticeable this time; she was already starting to sink back into the surroundings she knew so well. The bed was immaculately made, the room clean and tidy. There was a little prayer strip on her desk, along with a few talismans. Nanoha shied away from looking too closely at them. She knew that if she read what was written on those prayers, any hope of not crying would go out the window.

There was a thin layer of dust on the furniture. Not thick enough for prolonged neglect, just the light settling that built up over a few days. She ignored it, and slumped down on the bed, awkwardly pulling a pillow down to hug it as best she could with one arm. She breathed in the smell of her room, buried her head in the pillows, and trembled with the force of the feelings rebounding around inside her. Linith hovered in the doorway as her charge fought to clamp a lid down on her emotions, uncertain of how to help. After a few seconds, Nanoha heard a change in the texture of the room, and the soft pad of feline footsteps proceeded across the floor and up onto the bed. A warm, furry shape curled up on the pillow she was hugging, and licked her good hand a couple of times.

They were still lying there fifteen minutes later, when the sound of a car engine broke the quiet sounds of the evening as it pulled up outside.

The sound woke Nanoha where she lay in a half-doze. She felt light, unconnected, as if she was living in a dream. Her eyes were still dry – she hadn’t broken down – but now that the emotional storm had passed, she felt curiously numb for the moment, like the land after a storm had passed.

Downstairs, the key scrabbled in the lock, and Nanoha’s stomach somehow contrived to instantly wind itself into a knot. Perhaps the eye of a hurricane was a better analogy, she corrected herself, and glanced at Linith. The cat looked back patiently, neither urging her onwards nor holding her back. Linith was evidently content to let her go at her own pace.

Shiro and Kyouya were conferring in low voices in the sitting room as she crept down the stairs. Despite her attempts to be quiet, they still heard her – she had never managed to get away with that before, and she hadn’t really expected to now. Both men snapped around, tensing at the faint creak from the step under her foot until they saw the slight silhouette on the staircase that had caused it.

“Papa?” Nanoha whispered. “Kyouya? Miyuki?”

Her sister emerged from the kitchen, the tail end of a comment tossed over her shoulder trailing off as she saw her brother and father staring transfixed at the stairs. She turned to see what they were looking at, and froze.

“Mum!” she said urgently. Her tone of voice conveyed enough that nothing more was necessary. From further inside the kitchen there was a clang of something being dropped, and through the door in a flurry of skirts came...

Nanoha wasn’t sure whether it was her or Momoko who let out the sob as they saw each other. It was her that reached out though, prompting another wordless sound from the older woman. Belatedly, she realised that she was still holding the pressed flower, the pink ribbon looped twice around her wrist. She felt her lip tremble as she looked from her family to it, then back to them. Back to Momoko.

“... mama,” she half-said, half-sobbed. And lunging forwards to bury her face in her mother’s chest, she finally burst into tears.

...

She was bored almost to tears.

A glass of sugar-frosted fruit juice sitting before her, Flotilla Admiral Lindy Harlaown repressed a sigh and stared out the window. Hands folded in her lap, she tried not to make it obvious that she was staring over the ear of the guest sitting opposite to her, staring out over to the shallow blue-green sea to the east. The bleak grey stone of the Markvalv, now overgrown with greenery, rose out of the water, stretching between coral islands and across tidal marshes across over to the island of Niorackal.

 _‘When's my next meeting?’_ she thought at her device.

[Your next appointment is a video conference with Captain Abuego, in one hour and thirty-one minutes] the system informed her.

There were small birds outside her window, their bright orange plumage shining in the sun. Carefully, she watched as they plucked the bitter oranges off the tree she was growing on her balcony, completing ignoring the scare-ward which was up. _‘Oh well,’_ she thought. _‘Prioritise my workflow for me, and alert me if anything big comes in. Or small.’_

[Yes, ma'am.]

She shook her head, and focused on the plate of spiced sweetrice the dark-haired woman next to her was offering. “I really shouldn't,” she told the local politician, and winced. “I'm trying to keep to a diet, and this lunch is already pushing it. And if I have desert like that, I can't allow myself sugar in my tea.”

“Oh, fair enough,” the other woman said, ladling some out for herself. “Delion?”

“Oh, don't mind if I do,” said the older man in the robe daubed with jade beads, reaching over to take it.

It was another lunch with various dignities from Suionetheod and other worlds close to the sector capital. As as the ranking TSAB official, her presence was required, and considering that the man opposite to her was the speaker of the Lanselik Parliament, it would have been considered a snub to pass it off to some lesser officer. And then it descended into a mix of local politics which she was forced to care about, because the Vodonyad Treaty Organisation couldn't let the Lanselik League appear to be the senior party at the dinner and then the Watselic League had insisted that they receive extra seats and then the ambassador from Oneriod complained that Suionetheodi nations were dominating the list and...

It wasn't even like it was a formal dinner, Lindy thought with more than a hint of self-pity. But what it was for all of them was a chance to be shown to be consulting with the senior TSAB admiral – a joke in itself considering she was one of the most junior district-level naval officers there was – and so reinforce their own positions in their local politics. The Suionetheodi nationals all wanted to show their closeness to the Bureau, the lesser worlds wanted to make it clear that they too had a voice and they weren't just sending people off to the parliament ten light-hours from here for no gain, and she...

... well, she wanted lunch because this morning had been more than a little stressful. She normally actually quite enjoyed these lunches, when the mess of the seating arrangements was being dealt with by someone else. It was nice to keep up with people, and she was on speaking terms – at least – with most of the people in the room. But right now, she just wanted to get back to her desk, because she’d lost a ship.

Not lost-lost... at least, she didn’t think so. The _Ravi_ just hadn’t checked in on the next stop on its resupply cycle on the bases on the far reaches of her district. The nearest ship which could help find it was four days out, and that was another supply ship; hardly something she wanted to send into a situation she knew nothing about.

As it stood, she was just waiting for the check-in call to make its way from the facility on Pihroea which had been its last designated call-in point. She wanted a check on Dimensional Space conditions and whether there had been any unexpected navigational hazards. Their last check-in, four days ago, had reported several flux events – nothing out of the usual – but she’d prefer to think that the ship might just have had to divert or even anchor down for a few days in orbit around an empty dimension than anything worse had happened.

“So, Admiral Harlaown,” the woman next to her said. “What do you think of the current situation in Feeneshk, then?”

“I'm sorry,” Lindy said, with a smile to soften the non-answer, “but I really couldn't comment on that.” She reached forwards, sipping her juice. “Even if I wanted to, it's in the courts at the moment. Naturally, I'd really hope both sides could work it out and remain friends. As long as both sides remain in compliance with the terms of their membership charters, however, the Navy has no official position save that we call for both sides to avoid escalating matters. And...” at that moment something chimed in her ear. “I'm sorry, but I have a call,” she apologised, accepting the incoming link.

_‘Admiral. This is Captain Bhatti... I'm the senior officer on monitoring at the moment. We have the response from Pihroea.’_

_‘Oh, good,’_ Lindy thought back. _‘Clear? Have they heard anything from the_ Ravi _at their end?’_

_‘Could you please report to Monitoring, ma'am? I think we have a problem.’_

Lindy made her apologies as hastily as she could without seeming to be worried, “Oh, it's nothing; just an unexpected message which I have to deal with in person which wants a prompt response,” and rose, making her way back to the main office compound. They were very much a product of the local architectural style; domes and fluted columns and floating holograms, though there had been extensive modification to bring them up to the standards of a sector office. Kicking off from the ground, the green-haired woman felt the invisible mesh of wards and authorisation checks like cobwebs against her skin as she ascended, coming down on the roof.

It was faster than waiting for the lifts, she justified to herself. Then it was in through the security gates, past the higher security checks, and down into the windowless monitoring room, in the heart of the building.

“Ma'am. Something's up,” the duty officer said, not even looking up from his screen. “We got a navigation response back, but... the anti-replay counter is a duplicate. They're either being flagrantly lazy with their communications, or someone's cloned the message. I think it's the latter.”

“Oh dear,” Lindy said, dreading what was about to come. “Why?”

The man swallowed. “All three of the auxiliary responses are showing the dead man's handle has been triggered, but the main message isn't showing. Look here; DST-SM, RMS-SM, GOS-SM; deadman-red, but... all green on the main. Ma'am... the auxiliaries are isolated from the main system, in physically separate locations from each other and from the main system. Scrying and teleport interdictions are are up according to the message, so I haven't been able to verify the status of the facility. And... uh, well, I checked this up in the handbook, and this means we have to treat that facility as if it's compromised until the entire site has been secured and specialists have verified system security. And the system here has raised multiple automatic alarms and that means this message is being passed to neighbouring districts and being sent to Fleet Command.”

“They won't be hearing for ten hours,” Admiral Harlaown said, mind already whirring. “Another ten, for the response. I want to have an answer by the time it gets there.” She glared at the chart showing the chain of worlds which terminated in Pihroea.

No, it didn't terminate, she thought, struck by a sudden cold chill. That was just the last world marked as a TSAB-controlled one along that chain. Four worlds along the same chain was Unadministered World 97. The place which had caused so much trouble six months ago. Precia Testarossa might have been dead – and more than dead, unmade in the fathomless depths of antimagic under the dimensional sea – but others would have felt the waves from the quake she triggered. Others would have come looking, especially when rumour inevitably escaped about the untouched Alhazredian ruin of the Garden of Time. The young ferr... archeologist had said the Garden was ‘literally priceless’, but Lindy didn't underestimate the human capacity to put a price on things and then try to sell them.

And Pihroea was the nearest Administered World with a TSAB presence, monitoring equivalent and a spaceport to allow more things to be shipped in easily. If someone wanted to blind the TSAB to events in that region, Pihroea would have to be neutralised.

“Get a connection to Chr... to Enforcer Harlaown,” she said, trying to keep her breathing under control. “Tell him to find a squad of A-rankers – minimum – and to jump to... is there a secure rally point on Pihorea away from that facility? If not, jump one world away and investigate. Carefully, but I'd like answers before Mid calls!”

...

“Hush now, shh...”

The tangle of movement, embraces, crying and laughter lasted for a while, and subsided slowly. As Nanoha’s tears and shrieks of joy began to run dry, her sobs became hiccups and sniffs, and she was able to take stock of her position again. She had migrated somehow to the sofas in the family room, where she was sitting on Momoko’s lap with her family gathered around her. Warm arms encircled her, hugging her every bit as tight as she was hugging her mother. They weren’t the only pair; someone was hugging her from the side as well. Blinking tears out of her eyes, Nanoha turned to find Miyuki grinning at her from similarly watery eyes.

“Hey, little sis,” she said with remarkable composure. A breath of laughter escaped her as she looked over the younger girl. “Long time no see.” She giggled again, the sound choking off into a quiet sob as the absurdity of the greeting hit her.

Nanoha could only nod, not trusting herself to speak. She looked to her right and found Shiro patiently waiting – she was fairly sure he had picked her up and spun her round at some point while she was crying, but couldn’t be certain. She had been too busy crying to see.

“Papa,” she whispered hoarsely, adding “Kyouya...” as her older brother leaned in to ruffle her hair affectionately and kiss her on the forehead. “I... I missed you.” She blinked rapidly, clumsily wiping her eyes dry with the heel of her good hand. Shiro’s eyes flickered downward slightly, and his smile dimmed. Only for a second, though. He tried to frown, but the expression was eclipsed by the pride and joy of seeing her again, shining out of his expression like a lantern.

“I’m glad to see you too, love,” he said. His eyebrows drew together in an attempt at disapproval, though he was still unable to banish the happiness from his face entirely. “I’m less glad, though, to see that you’ve hurt yourself.” He nodded down at the faint tan light wreathing Nanoha’s immobile arm. “What happened?”

“Huh? Oh. Um.” Nanoha blushed slightly. “Yeah. I, uh... hit someone. Really hard. That... didn’t... go so well. Um. But I think I sort of broke her jaw, so... uh... fair’s fair? And she was attacking... Arisa!” She looked up suddenly, concerned. “I had to leave her there when I got driven off... is she okay?” She bit her lip, worrying. Arisa had looked so frail, lying there under the hammer with the glowing ball of her Linker Core above her chest. Absorbed in sending a message back to the others about her suspicions and coming back home, it had slipped her mind, but now concern flooded through her. Had she been in time?

“Hush, sweetheart. She’s fine,” Momoko reassured her. “I popped in to see her before your father arrived to pick me up, and she was more or less awake. Not particularly happy, and feeling terrible, but the doctors said she would make a full recovery. If I’m anything to go by, she should be mostly up and about within a week or so.”

Nanoha eyed her mother sceptically. The black eye had faded to light bruising, though Nanoha could still see burn marks on her hands and forearms. She seemed to be leaning slightly on Nanoha as well, and looked tired. And for all that she was hugging Nanoha, she was treating her lower chest a little gingerly, too.

Her scrutiny didn’t go unnoticed, and Momoko kissed her on the forehead. “I’m fine, dear,” she reassured again. “A little banged up still, but fine. Arisa told me what she remembered, when we got a free moment to talk. She seems to think that the girl – she called her a ‘red devil-girl’ – was that organisation from, ah... last time. The TSAB? I told her I didn’t think so, but I suppose you would know better than me.”

Nanoha thought about it briefly, then shook her head firmly. “No,” she said, confidence born of experience backing her up, “no, it’s definitely not them. They wouldn’t do something like this, and even if they did, they’d operate in a completely different way. I have... some ideas on who it might be, but I doubt the TSAB have been back here since... um...” her head dropped slightly as she finished, “since I had to leave.”

“But now you’re home.” Momoko hugged her again and chuckled. “And whatever happened in the end there – the woman who came to see us said something about a quake? We felt it here. It has lots of scientists very excited, for some reason. Something about the effects going faster than light or being felt by sensor stations all over the world at exactly the same time – there’s been a lot of talk about it.” She grinned conspiratorially. “To tell the truth, it’s been rather fun being the only one who knows what happened. Though Arisa and Suzuka-chan say you warned them off telling anyone about magic, so we’ve kept quiet about it. But if we felt the effects here, it must have been terrible close-by, and when the woman told us you hadn’t...”

She tailed off for a few seconds, paling. Looking around, Nanoha could see a shadow pass across the expressions of her whole family for a moment at the memory. After a moment, Momoko mustered up a brave smile and continued. “Well, even if we hoped that she was wrong, it was a big relief to get your letter the next day. You weren’t hurt by it?”

Nanoha hugged her again in remorse, before detaching reluctantly to hug the others in turn. “We were okay,” she replied. “I had to take some horrible-tasting medicine to make sure the mana concentration didn’t have any side effects, but that was more just to be sure. And we teleported out before the Garden actually collapsed, so we weren’t really near the blast.”

“Very clever.” Shiro knelt down to look at her hand, while Miyuki cooed over Nanoha’s new clothes. She gave her sister a quick explanation of Jackets while he examined the magical cast and carefully felt her fingers – making her glad that her arm was numb. When he was done, he let her go and nodded his satisfaction. “I don’t know what that spell is doing, but it seems to be healing quickly,” he concluded. “And other than breaking your fingers hitting people – which we need to talk about – have you been well?”

“Uh huh! I’ve been studying hard at school – Dimensional Space school, but I’ve been trying my best there and learning a lot. And practicing my magic, though Fate-chan is still better than me by a bit. Precia-san has been teaching me some things to make up for it, though, and she’s a lot happier now that Alicia-chan is better. And... and I scry to see you every fortnight, and think of you every day. That’s how I knew mama was hurt, I saw her in the hospital.” She hugged Momoko again, pressing the flower into her hands. “You kept it,” she mumbled, unable to contain a smile.

“Silly,” her mother whispered back, nuzzling her hair. She tucked it into a pocket, patting it securely. “Of course I kept it. I look at it every day and think of you, out there on another world.” She frowned. “Speaking of which... did you come here alone, Nanoha?”

The girl blinked in surprise, remembering her companion. “Oh! No, I... um... Linith? Linith!”

‘Mreow,’ Linith replied, trotting up in her cat for from where she had been sitting patiently near the stairs. She paused to allow the assembled Takamachis to take her in, and transformed. A brief tan glow overtook her form, and she grew sharply, rising up to human height as her shape changed fluidly. Then the light faded, leaving the maternal features that Nanoha had come to know well over the last half-year.

She curtsied neatly. “Hello Takamachi-san,” she greeted Momoko and Shiro politely. “My name is Linith, I am Precia’s familiar. I’m pleased to meet you, we’ve all heard a great deal about you from Nanoha, and we’re very grateful to her for helping us.”

Nanoha’s parents appraised her, charmed by the polite introduction, though slightly confused at the way she had made it. Nanoha winced slightly. The translation pack for Japanese was fairly basic, and she knew Raising Heart and Bardiche had been expanding theirs from listening to her. She hadn’t realised Linith had been doing the same. A grown woman using the speech inflections of a nine-year old sounded... odd.

Still, her family seemed to understand, and Linith was soon engaged in a lively dialogue with Shiro over what had happened while she and Nanoha had been travelling, with Kyouya and Miyuki interjecting here and there. Nanoha watched as they discussed the possibilities, and frowned when Linith brought up her theory that it was a rogue group of mages.

“Mama,” she whispered quietly. “I think there’s something I need to tell you.”

Momoko nodded slowly, giving her a searching look. “Yes,” she replied cautiously, weighing her words. “And I think the same goes for me.”

...

With a hum, the broadcast relay came to life, and everyone in the impromptu camp looked up at the sudden noise. The sun – larger than that of humanity’s homelands – hung heavy on one horizon, casting long shadows across the parched land.

“Okay, that's online,” the squad's technical expert said, adjusting something on the glowing control window before her. She brushed a silver lock away from her eyes, leaning over the system. “We... yes, the calibration signal from the transmitter on Runcorn is coming through. I need to do narrow-band set up, and then ping it.” She sucked in air through her teeth. “Call it fifteen minutes for set-up, and then it'll be eight in and eight out to check that Runcorn can get us. Forty minutes, say, before confirmation that transmission is working.” She clicked her tongue. “While I get this set up, make sure you've all designated AAA-1 as your primary recording node, 'kay?”

“I hate working without ship back-up,” a man with dirty blond hair grumbled. Cross-legged on the ground, his green-grey-brown Barrier Jacket blending into the dry earth, he was fiddled with one of the tents, trying to find out why the electrofabric wasn't working. “We are really at the back-end of nowhere out here. Hours away from any support, no teleport booster, no ship, no retreat, and everything feels like it's going to go Gee Oh Tee shaped.” He sighed. “I’d rather be home with my boyfriend.”

“I’d rather be home with your boyfriend, too!” the woman joked, snickering.

Enforcer Chrono Harlaown looked up in mild irritation from the plans he was pouring over. “Being pessimistic like that helps no one,” he reprimanded. “We shouldn't make judgements until we have access to more data. We'll know more when the other team gets back from their observation run.”

“Yeah, Ivali,” the silver-haired woman working on the transmitter said, “there's no reason to believe it's that bad yet. I mean, there hasn't been a single scythe-wielding nine-year old, I haven't been electrocuted or concussed, and we haven't even _seen_ a Alhazredian war golem.” She shot a smirk at the fifteen-year old staring at the map, who was a good six years younger than her. “But then again, I have encountered them on one-hundred percent of the missions I've been on with the Enforcer, and statistics don't lie, right?”

Chrono squared his jaw, and tried to ignore the snickering from the older mages. They'd been the nearest A-ranker squadron to his line of travel from Suionetheod, so he'd arranged to meet them on Christophzeikselin, but they were precisely that; the local fast response squad for the most dead-end placement in all of this backwater district; seven people covering a volume nearly a light-hour and a half across. They hadn't even been here during the Jewel Seed Incident. They'd only been positioned in the hot, humid capital of the world for four months

It was sort of his advice which had left them stationed here, because he'd filed reports saying the district didn't have enough resources to make sure that all the territory could be reached by a fast-response squad in a day without leaving them wiped out for the transport. So the region-level Fleet Command had authorised several older posts to be expanded and new teams stationed there. Posts which were pretty much always in backwaters where the entire planetary population was clumped on one continent.

He suspected they suspected that it was his fau... his doing that they were stationed all the way out here. And that might have been why they were giving him a hard time.

Though that might have just been the normal attitude that your average twenty-year old A-ranker displayed to a fifteen-year old AAA-ranker who'd been given command over them.

Rather than dwell on that, though, he focused on the map of the training facility and compound. It was a standard design, built to identical specifications on worlds like this all over Dimensional Space, which had made finding the plans easier. He'd trained in and against such places already. But he still wasn't going to leave things to chance, so he was checking against the local plans he'd recovered to see if they'd diverged at all from the standard template.

His investigations had already paid off. They had been unduly lax and sloppy when placing this facility, in his opinion. The primary web of ground-based sensors was obscured by the hilly terrain to the south of the facility, and rather than place a secondary listening post to cover it, they'd simply scattered automated sensors among the hills. The scouting team of the squad leader and three subordinates were already moving in to take them out, and allow them a clean line of approach. And the mandatory clearance of dense foliage around a facility had not been maintained; the southern hills were covered in gorse and dry, wiry trees.

Good for them, yes, but if the facility had been compromised, he was prepared to make a – small – wager that the hostiles had used that line of approach too. He had ordered the scouting team to watch for traps left by the attackers, and had been rewarded with rolled eyes and a 'Yes, Enforcer Harlaown. That is standard protocol,' which had bordered on the insubordinate.

He looked away from the three-dimensional map of the facility for a moment, and shaded his eyes against the setting sun. It was getting chilly, the parched country losing its heat to a cloudless sky. This really was a backwater. This base was the main TSAB facility on the entire Type-3 planet. There were a few ecological stations and specialised training grounds, but some of them were automated – only manned when they were required to be – and the ones which had answered had expressed confusion and said they hadn't seen anything. The local population was a mix of subsistence farmers and some neofeudal tribals living in what had once been an Alhazredian city.

Nothing that could take down a TSAB facility, especially not before it could get a warning out. By his estimate, any force which could do that would have to... well, you could probably do it with a fair-sized force of A-rankers and inside knowledge – much like he was planning to do – but to be reliable, you'd probably want multiple AA-rankers. Hit hard and fast, take out communications...

... but they were still operational. They'd just been hacked. So either they managed to get in fast enough to lock down the comms, or it was an inside job. Or there was something he wasn't taking into account. Something... like someone powerful enough, like how Precia Testarossa had been, to lock down all signals from a planet which was how she had kept her activities on UA97 a secret until the dimensional quake.

Chrono just didn't know. Although he really hoped it wasn't another mage of Testarossa's level. Or her rage maddened ghost returned from Imaginary Space to wreck vengeance on the TSAB.

Which was ridiculous. Of course.

His Barrier Jacket chimed, alerting him to incoming signals, and he turned around to see the scouting team, flying low, pull in and land at the camp. “Lieutenant,” he said, to the shortest member of the group, “what do you have?”

The blue-haired woman was frowning; not a good sign. “Cleared a path through the sensor grid. You were right; there's a blindspot which let us zero-fric slide up the hill to get line of sight on the target. Defence systems are active. Jalinsk flickered a Sensor Ghost over on the next hill, and they moved to acquire it.”

“What's the condition of the facility?” he asked.

“Damaged,” the woman said, frankly. “One of the barracks is gutted, and they're fire-proofed; must have been a really hot fire for that to happen. Battle damage is visible, too; on the walls. Not much of it, though, and most of it around the burned-out barracks. Burned-out cargo loader on the landing bay, but we couldn't get an ID on it.”

“So it's an assault,” Chrono said slowly. “Any sign of hostiles occupying the facility?”

“Nothing,” a taller clean-shaven man said. “No hostiles... apart from the defences. No bodies, either. The place just looks... abandoned.”

...

It was quiet in the kitchen with the door closed. Momoko quietly moved a chair against the door to stop anyone opening it casually, and winked at Nanoha.

“I’ve been keeping this away from your father, so don’t tell him where it is,” she told her conspiratorially, and rooted around in the back of the fridge for a moment, behind a stack of chilled containers. She emerged with a clingfilm-wrapped plate, on which sat two or three slices of cake that made Nanoha’s stomach growl just looking at them. Momoko smiled fondly.

“I rather thought you might have missed our cakes,” she said fondly. “Alright, let’s finish this up ourselves, shall we? They shouldn’t be _that_ stale because I put them in the evening before I... got attacked. And we can talk while we’re eating.” Producing two forks and another plate, she sat down at the table and waited for Nanoha to take a seat next to her.

The first bite was heaven, and Nanoha heard her mother chuckle at the happy sigh that emerged as rich chocolate hit her tongue. Slightly stale or not, it was still a taste she’d been missing for almost half a year. She didn’t see her mother’s amusement, because she’d closed her eyes to better savour the taste, and by the time she opened them again Momoko had got her mirth back under control.

“Well then, I suppose we should start,” she reflected. “Do you want to go first, or shall I?”

“Um...” Nanoha licked her lips, clearing them of icing. “I think me? At least, I think mine is more important. Uh... no offence, but...”

“No, no.” Momoko nodded freely. “Go on ahead, then. What’s your news?”

Nanoha took a deep breath.

“When I saw how the girl – the red one I fought – was draining Linker Cores, I remembered something I learnt in school. I think they’re part of the Book of Darkness. It’s this...” she searched for words, “... this ancient machine-thing, a magical construct that’s no longer understood anymore. Like the Jewel Seeds. And it’s... horrible. It uses its guardians to eat Linker Cores and magic until it has enough, and then it goes on a rampage. It’s laid waste to whole _worlds_ before. We have to stop it!”

Momoko frowned. “Your friend Linith didn’t seem to think so...”

But Nanoha shook her head angrily, cutting her hand down in a sharp gesture that would have tracked cake across half the kitchen had there been any still on her fork. “She says it’s probably just rogue mages imitating them, but... it’s not. I mean, I guess it might be, but I bet it’s not. It’s a magic-eating thing, so I bet its master is following rumours of the Jewel Seeds which are full of lots and lots of magic and so it wound up on Earth. And if it is... we need to be ready for it.”

“Ah. Well.” Momoko looked a little uncomfortable for a moment, before leaning forward and resting her elbows on the table. Silence reigned in the room for a moment, save for the slow ticking of the wall clock next to the door, as she stared at her plate as if a script were written on it in code, decipherable if only she could concentrate hard enough.

“... I lied to your father about what happened,” she said eventually. “And Kyouya, and Miyuki. I told them I didn’t see my attacker. I did.”

Nanoha stared.

“... wh-why?” she asked eventually, when it became clear that Momoko wasn’t going to look up or expound further. Her mother merely sighed.

“Because if I told them what really happened, they would try to... oh, I don’t know. Probably fight themselves. And then they would...” She trailed off, pressing her lips together, before changing track to finish, “I would really rather not see any of them in hospital. Again.”

She looked up, evaluating Nanoha carefully. “I’m only telling _you_ this because I have a feeling you’re going to get involved anyway, and I want you to know what you’re dealing with. But... Nanoha, please promise me. If you find yourself in facing a woman with pink hair who uses a sword... don’t try to fight her. Just run. Please.”

“But...”

“ _Nanoha._ ” Momoko’s voice was like iron alloyed with desperation, cutting her daughter’s protest off before it started. She softened as she continued heavily. “The woman... she came out of nowhere, while I was closing up the bakery. One minute I was in the café and the street outside was crowded, the next... nothing. The world turned grey and all the people just... vanished.”

“A dimensional barrier,” Nanoha muttered, to Momoko’s nod.

“Yes. It was... an unpleasant experience. I picked up a broom and went to investigate – your father has been teaching me a lot, since you left. She didn’t quite catch me by surprise, and I tried to fight back...”

Her eyes became misty with reminiscence, and tinged with faint pain. “She was abominably strong,” she recalled. “And fast, too. She didn’t respond to anything I said, just kept looking at me dispassionately. But it was her _skill_ that was the worst thing. I could tell she was holding back, playing with me – I don’t know why. I tried everything I could think of, a few things I invented on the spot... nothing. I never even touched her. And then... then I think perhaps she got bored, or maybe found out everything she needed to know, I really have no idea. Her sword caught fire and she cut my broom in half like it was nothing. I remember raising my hands to protect my face, and then... nothing.”

She gestured at the faint burns on her arms. “Evidently it was a good thing I did, I suppose. I woke up in hospital with moderate burns and bruises, as well as severe exhaustion. The magic-ripping, I suppose. But the thought of Shiro and your siblings going up against her... they wouldn’t stand a chance, Nanoha. I can at least press Shiro if I use my magic, even with the gap in skill. But I was throwing everything I had at her and she wasn’t even trying. It was like...” she cast around for an analogy, “... like a lion swatting an errant cub. I wasn’t even an annoyance. Please, promise me you won’t try to fight her. And don’t tell the others, I don’t want them to face a... a monster like that.”

Nanoha didn’t like it, but grudgingly nodded. At least to the second request, that she could see the sense in. “I won’t,” she promised, meaning her silence. Momoko sagged in relief, and Nanoha decided not to reveal what she was already planning to do if she came face to face with the woman who’d hurt her. Flaming sword or no, she’d...

... flaming sword.

Nanoha paled. “R... Raising Heart,” she said urgently. “The... oh, what were they called? The Book’s servants, what were they?”

[Wolkenritter, my master.] Despite having seen and heard the gem before, and having a simple Device of her own, Momoko still gasped in delight as Raising Heart spoke. [Designated Blade, Breaker, Hound, Healer. Known to...]

“That’s enough, Raising Heart. Thank you,” Nanoha interrupted. She turned to her mother, expression tense. “You said she was a swordsman, who used fire-natured spells? That fits the description of the Blade that I read when I looked them up. And the one I fought fits the Breaker. I think...”

She breathed in again, the cake in front of her forgotten. “I think this proves it. The Book of Darkness is here. And that means we’re _all_ in danger.”

...

“Dollie, stop distracting me, it’s dangerous! You nearly made me mess up! If you’re doing this on purpose, I’ll be very cross!”

Precia watched as her daughter scolded the doll floating in front of her in a blue-tinted maintenance field, which held objects suspended in the air where they were placed. It was not the only object hovering in front of the five-year old, either. A complex latticework of interconnected components the size of her head hung before her, with the disassembled corners of a civ-Device’s card form visible at the edges of the tangle.

“Now, let me see...” Alicia said, mostly to herself, as she consulted the book that hovered to her left. “Okay, check the output values on the reader thingy against the ones in the table. Done that.” She concentrated intently, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. “Now I have to... um... test the standardised input whatjamacallits with the electric beeper-needle.” She surveyed the sticky-field with a hint of uncertainty. “Uh... Dollie? Where did I put the beeper needle? Did you hide it again?”

The stuffed doll hung innocently in the air, staring at her with its pretty red eyes. Alicia glared at it suspiciously for a second before subsiding. “Okay, fine, I believe you. Then it must have got lost somewhere! Let’s find it!”

A brief search turned up the implement, and she began to painstakingly test the input/output channels of the Device, one by one. Precia watched quietly, and with mixed feelings. It was, technically, a perfectly routine maintenance check of a basic Storage Device, unfolding the control lattice from the dimensional pocket it was stored in, partially disassembling it, testing it, and finally putting it back together again and folding it back up into its storage form. She herself had done procedures far more complex with far less effort and concentration, more often than she could count.

But she hadn’t been five years old at the time.

There was pride there, yes. Pride at her daughter’s genius, at the concentration and focus she was displaying. She might be simplifying the instructions and having difficulty with some of the longer words, but she was still clearly her mother’s daughter, and Precia’s heart swelled to see her methodically pressing the instrument’s needle to each circuit-connector in turn, occasionally conferring in a low voice with her doll about the results she was getting.

On the other hand, there was also concern. Because her daughter had certainly never done this before the accident. But then... Precia had never really seen as much of Alicia as she would have liked, and the girl had still been very young. She hadn’t been given much access to technology either, it was possible she would have shown this aptitude earlier if only she’d been able. Maybe it had just blossomed with the curriculum here on Schzenais. It certainly wasn’t something that Fate mirrored, that was for sure.

Precia sighed, watching with ever-present fondness as Alicia finished her checks and began to reassemble the civ-Device with quick, occasionally-imprecise movements. She almost raised her voice to intervene as two of the folds became tangled, but Alicia spotted it before they shorted one another out, and instead of trying to untangle them, she carefully unfolded them all the way out again and then started over.

Precia nodded approvingly. Despite her youth, she was certainly showing the signs of being competent with science and technology. But was it because she was her mother’s daughter? Or was it something else? The influence of the Jewel Seed, perhaps, or...

... no. No, it wasn’t. Precia closed her eyes and shook her head, frowning as she dismissed the worry forcefully. No, she had not failed this time. This _was_ her daughter, her true daughter. She had to be, Precia would know if she was not. Alicia was not another failure like Fate had been. Perhaps she was an unusually advanced child for her age, but it was still Alicia, her beloved darling girl. She had her back at last, after so long. She would _not_ allow groundless doubts to ruin this for her.

“Mama! Mama, look!”

Opening her eyes again, Precia regarded the re-assembled civ-Device with interest as Alicia proudly held it up for her. “I took it apart like the book said and put it back again!” she announced in triumph. “It was easy! And Dollie helped me! She’s really smart and knows things! But not as much as me!” She hugged the blue-haired stuffed toy to her with her free hand, and Precia smiled maternally at her.

“I saw, yes,” she said. “You did very well indeed. A proper little scientist.”

“I am, aren’t I!” Alicia cheered, bouncing happily. A few wispy locks of blonde hair escaped from the braid that Precia had helped her with that morning. “Is there anything else I can look at, mama? It was fun!”

“Well, I’m sure the book has other tests you can run,” Precia suggested. In fact, she knew it did, because she knew most of the tests in question almost off by heart. She prompted her Device to find its digital copy of the text and run a search. “Why don’t you try around... oh, page seventy three? That seems like a good place to look.”

“Okay!”

Alicia ran off back to her desk, Dollie in tow, and eagerly started thumbing through the Device maintenance text again. After a few moments of tracing the words with her finger as her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth, occasionally interrupted as she conferred with Dollie as to what some of the longer words meant, she picked up the card-form Device on the table again and twisted it carefully. It came again apart in her hands, the dimensionally-stored lattice responding to the unlock command, and she began to unfold it to its full size once more.

Precia reclined in her high-backed chair and watched. Her attention was not so focused on Alicia, though, that she failed to miss another figure approach her, red eyes staring wistfully at the happy five-year old.

“Fate,” she greeted cordially. Now that she had Alicia back, she had to admit that the girl’s appearance bothered her... considerably less than it had once done. And she made Alicia happy, too. “Is there something I can do for you?”

Fate stayed quiet for a little while, watching Alicia. After a few moments, she pulled up a padded stool next to Precia’s chair and sat down. She was avoiding Precia’s gaze, the older woman noted. In fact, she was avoiding looking at Precia at all.

“I wasn’t like that,” she eventually said softly. It obviously wasn’t what she had come to talk about, but it was a lead-in. “I never... did anything like that. She’s wonderful, isn’t she?”

Precia’s eyes flicked over to Alicia, currently engaged in loudly counting across a row of wire-filaments stemming from the central processor-crystal to find port twenty seven. A slight smile curved her lips. “She is, isn’t she? Well, she was always such a coordinated, graceful little girl. I'm...” She broke off for a moment to cough twice, quietly, before continuing. “I’m proud that she's managing to work at such a level all on her own.” She paused reflectively. “You weren't, Fate. It was one of the ways I knew you were... were someone else. You were so clumsy when you were made. You improved, but... you weren’t her.”

Fate nodded, accepting the statement without argument. She remembered it too, the first few weeks and months after waking. She had been ungainly, awkward, uncertain of where her limbs were or how her body was meant to work. It had been a struggle to end up with proper coordination, though it had eventually paid off with Linith’s help.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down. “That I wasn’t. That you had to wait this long.”

Precia shrugged laconically. “I have her now. And you make her happy. I wish I could have more time with her, but...”

And there it was; the slight flinch and the flicker of red eyes towards her. Precia nodded internally. She’d had a feeling it would be this. She looked back at the girl patiently, waiting for her to speak.

“You mean...” Fate asked tentatively, and hesitated, tripping over her words. “I mean... I thought... since Alicia is better...” She paused miserably, searching Precia’s face for a reprieve that wasn’t there. “Then... you’re still...”

Precia nodded, lacing her fingers together in her lap. “Yes, my condition continues to deteriorate. Without the ritual... if I hadn't done it, I might have lasted four or five years. But that would not have been living. Not without her. And... and if the TSAB hadn't got to the throne room, that might have been another six months to a year.” She grimaced at the memory. “Those two were monstrously powerful.”

Fate gasped softly, tears brimming in her eyes. Her knuckles turned white as her fists clenched in the fabric of her dress. “... M-Mother, I'm so sorry for not... for not... for not keeping them away from...”

“Fate. Child,” Precia interrupted her. “They were a threat to me, drawing on the Jewel Seeds. What is done is done.” She glanced over at Alicia, still busily working at her table, and sighed. “But... these are the final stages. My organs are dying. I need an oxygen-concentrator even to breath; haven’t you noticed how I cough less?”

“... I... I had thought that maybe...”

A shake of the head. “No. There are no last minute reprieves for me, I’m afraid. I have between four and seven months left. Possibly a little longer in a coma, but that’s not living either. Not really.” The woman squeezed her eyes shut tiredly. She was a little surprised at the lack of bitterness she was feeling. Weariness, yes, and grief. But the anger and hatred she’d expected at the thought of her demise wasn’t there. Alicia’s smile seemed to have washed her clean of such things. “I... I had hoped... well, to shield Alicia and you from this. Please. Don't tell her. Let it be a surprise to her. I don't want anything to ruin our last months together. And remember what I told you, when last we spoke of this. She will need you, when I am gone. You and Nanoha both.”

Fate’s lips trembled, and a faint sob shook her body. But she pressed her mouth into a thin line and didn’t make a sound, though tears tracked down her cheeks. Looking from Alicia to Precia and back, she nodded wordlessly, took a deep breath, and withdrew. Precia watched her leave the room out of the corner of her eye, and saw her all but fall into the arms of her familiar as she left Alicia’s line of sight, burying her face in the wolf-woman’s shoulder.

Would Alicia take it better, or worse? She was a more cheerful child than... than her older sister, that was true. But would that make her better or worse at handling grief and mourning for the first time in her young life?

“Mama? Where’s the... rotator thingy? It says that the job of the rotator is to keep the parts in coherent dimensional syn-chron-iss-ity and... uh... tran-zish-un them through the spay-shul dimensions, but I’ve been looking and looking and I can’t find _anything_ that spins around in this mess! It’s hiding from me!”

Precia pulled herself back to the present. There would be other times to worry about how Alicia would cope. Fate would grieve now, ahead of time, and so she would be strong when her sister needed her. Her devotion to the younger girl was something in which Precia could find no fault, and had never been able to even in the early days. But for now, she would put such dark thoughts aside, and enjoy her time with her daughter.

Every day was precious, after all.

...

Face down in the dirt, Chrono silently thanked the fact that his barrier jacket was keeping the omnipresent dust out of his mouth. The projective garment, recoloured to a messy shade of dirt, was the only thing stopping him from choking on it. It was night, and the alien stars of the Type-3 night hung in the sky above. Two of the moons, tiny compared to the giant satellite of mankind’s native Type-1, had already risen. If he looked up, he could have zoomed in on the one ahead of him, a reddish irregular ball of rock, but he was too busy paying attention to the mission.

The TSAB mages were all greenish-brown patches against the ground, gliding over the surfaces on low-friction fields. It was the only way they could avoid the footprint sensors in the ground while also sneaking below the canopy of the aerial coverage, but it was hard going.

It was... aggravating how much less troublesome the others seemed to be finding it. Yes, he’d done the mandatory wilderness training, but pretty much everything he’d done in his almost-a-year as an Enforcer had been on ships or close to urban areas. That was where pretty much all the crimes tended to happen. Even the whole Jewel Seed Incident had happened in a densely populated area – which had been incredibly stressful at the time, but at least there had been buildings and the terrain he was most used to fighting in. He just seemed to be an urban boy, Chrono decided, as he made his way up to the brow of the slope.

Still, eventually they were in position, and he could slowly, painfully edge his way up to the brink of the hill and see the target facility with his own eyes. Or, rather, with the black wide spectrum goggles he had acquired – at personal expense – after the whole fiasco at the Garden of Time where the Testarossa clone had used AMFs to ruin his Jacket’s light amplification, forcing it into hardened mode. If he went up against another AMF, he’d be ready.

Making good use of them, he took in the location, staring down from the rise. The area was surrounded by a mesh fence twice the height of a man; he could see no breaches in it. Not very professional, but in these backwaters they weren’t funded for emitter grid networks. They could just fly over it without risking tripping an interdictor. Past that, there was a great deal of open ground. The landing strip was a glowing patch on thermals, the black material radiating the heat it had absorbed in the day into the night’s air. At least it was clear of overgrowth; they weren’t _that_ sloppy.

Still, in the dust and haze of this place, the buildings of the control tower, central facility and various barracks blocks – including the burned-out one – were misted, hard to resolve details. There was too much open ground to cover to get there, especially when the standard sentry turrets were taken into account and the way the sensor dome was still operational. It would acquire and target them if they flew or walked there. And it was armoured, made specifically so an attacker couldn’t take it out in one shot.

Chrono really wanted to know how whoever had compromised it had done it. They would have needed to be skilled, subtle and very fast to manage it, by his reckoning. Not the kind of people you found normally in backwaters like this. So, probably outsiders.

Oh well. He also had a way to bypass the defences.

 _‘I’m in position,’_ he broadcast on tightband, S2U, his device, beaming his telepathic message to the other locations of the mages. _‘Ready on confirmation.’_

A light on his visor turned green. Slowly, carefully, he drew his device, its storage card-form unfolding into a staff which he aimed at the burned-out building. Breathing slowly, he adjusted the aim so he was staring into one of the gutted windows.

[Scout Shot] chimed S2U.

A bolt of faint blue flashed out through the night, a streak mostly seen as an afterimage in the eye which passed into the window of the burned-out barracks. Chrono nodded once, in satisfaction, and then edged his way back from the lip of the hill, rolling over onto his back. _‘Chu, Helten, tune into my frequency,’_ he said. _‘I want other eyes on the feed. Tell me if you think I’m missing something. Helten, I’ll ask you to boost me if we need to blast something.’_

 _‘Understood,’_ was the response he got from them, as the other mages joined him slightly back from the edge. For his part, Chrono tuned out from the world, focusing entirely on the images he was getting from his scouting spell.

Down in the valley below, the pale blue orb drifted here and there, working its way through the burned out barracks. Every once in a while, it would pause and leave a fingernail-sized glimmer of light in mid-air. That was a necessity of the control method. The anti-scrying spells were still up over the entire base, interfering with any attempt to use the standard dimensional-membrane-based methods of affecting an area. But this close, Chrono could just send commands to his spell by leaving line-of-sight transmitters as he went.

The boy smiled to himself. It took rather a fine level of control to do this, if he said so himself. There were mages ten years his superior and a whole rank more qualified who couldn’t have managed to so finely place their transmitters.

 _‘Look here,’_ Chu sent, her voice tense. _‘This was the main quarters... the fire was most intense here. By this bit of wall that’s... mostly clean-melted through. Innomé, that’s an exterior wall. We’ll need to check for chemical residue, because if that was just magic... I’d hate to meet a mage who could make a fire that hot. The floor’s gone too... melted clean down into the basements.’_

 _‘Is... that a blade mark on the ceiling?’_ the other mage watching in remarked. _‘Might not mean anything of course; someone might have just scratched it. It’s the barracks after all.’_

Chrono agreed on that assessment, on all parts. He flicked through the spectrum. “Same temperature as background,” he muttered to himself. “Either someone cooled it down, or we can use it to set a minimum range for how long ago it was. And... weakly elevated mana levels all over the site. Higher than what they should be getting just from the wards.”

Placing another transmitter at the exit from the building, he steered his scout spell outside. There were no signs of life in the compound. No bodies, though, or blood. There were a few pockmarks on nearby walls characteristic of spells, but most of the other damage looked more like mass weapons or physical Devices. And either someone had put a fist through that door, or Chrono was a fool.

A voice interrupted the exploration. _‘How’re you going on getting that sensor dome down?’_ asked the leader of the squad.

 _‘Progressing,’_ he sent back, tersely. _‘Have the sensor dome in sight.’_

Drifting low along the floor, the faint blue glow hovered up stairs and towards the fortified tower the sensor dome was in. Its shields were up, and Chrono sighed. “S2U, optimise nodal path for efficient mana transfer, and then begin authorisation process,” he whispered to it.

[Beginning authorisation process,] his Device informed him. There was a painfully long pause, of almost two minutes as the system cycled through the standard codes. [All standard codes rejected,] it informed him. [System does not recognise Enforcer override.]

“How annoying,” he said softly, before switching to telepathy. _‘Helten, I’m going to need that boost on my signal.’_

The man pulsed a nod, and folded his staff back down into card-form, clutching it with both hands.

Carefully, delicately Chrono eased his scout spell up, over the egg-like shell shield, until he was staring directly down at the top of the sensor dome. He flexed his fingers, and then rolled back onto his front, working his way back along the crest of the ridge until he could see his original target. Stabilising his staff with a spell which made the air like tar, he smoothly swung it until the targeting reticule in his HUD was aimed at one of the markers which denoted where his scout had left a transmitter.

 _‘Chu, keep watching down the scout. Now, Helten,’_ he said, and his Device ignited in a pale golden glow, almost as if the sun had risen at night. “S2U. Lock current position. Establish transfer conduit.”

[Conduit established.]

“Good.” Chrono breathed in, released his hold on his immobile Device and flexed his fingers, held the breath, and let it out slowly. Time to give this little upgrade a whirl. He had begged and pleaded for it from his superiors – or at least sent multiple lengthy and elaborately cited request forms – after the Jewel Seed Incident on the grounds that he too often operated alone and needed more power to compensate for his lack of an Enforcer team behind him. “Load two cartridges,” he ordered, already beginning the spell process.

There were two sharp clicks from his Device, ejecting the emptied casings into his stabilisation spell, which held them, hanging in mid-air. One blue ring formed around the barrel, and then a second, their presence containing the gold-lit orb of blue mana forming. A third ring formed in front of the ball of mana, but it was miniscule, barely pencil-wide.

“Remote Impact Barb Penetrator!”

A blue flash illuminated the hillside, kicking up clouds of dust. A fingerswidth of mana erupted forth from the Enforcer’s device at terrifying speed, flashing across the kilometres in a mere second. It did not stop at where it was aimed, however, but deflected off the rebroadcast node, heading to the next one in the chain. For a moment, even through the dust, an onlooker could have seen the spiderweb of rebroadcasts etched out in the world by the passage before it reached the point at the pinnacle of the sensor dome and collided with the shield.

Against the focused intensity of Chrono’s shot, the white-orange glow of the shield flared into life for a moment and then shattered like dropped china, the entire top half of it falling away against the needle-like beam. The beam touched the top of the sensor dome, and...

“Penetrator Detonate!”

The main body of the collected mana rushed down the pencil-wide tracer, lighting the haze up in brilliance. The top half of the tower erupted in a miniature blue sun, blindingly bright in the night. When the light faded and the onlookers’ Jackets had faded back to transparency, the sensor dome was cracked like an egg, wrecked beyond use.

 _‘Teams Sword, Hammer, move!’_ the squad commander ordered, launching herself off from the ground, flying low and fast. The two flights of mages, Chrono included, rocketed through the haze, barely above the gorse and scrubland around the base. A slight jump over the fence, and then they were tearing across the landing pad, trying to clear the open terrain before they found out if any of the base’s defence systems were still operational.

The mad charge ended with one team up against a building, and the other behind the cover of the wrecked cargo lifter which had been noted earlier.

“Ha... aha. No return fire. Good... good job, Enforcer,” one of the mages next to Chrono whispered breathlessly, with respect obvious in his voice.

Chrono nodded. “We’re not through yet. We don’t know what happened here. We know that it seems a hostile who was able to subvert the systems was able to take the base, and that they also encountered resistance at one of the barracks. We saw no blood, no bodies on the scouting, but also no signs of survivors. We need to find the people who were here. And...” his heart sank, as he realised what he was hiding behind. “This isn’t a Ground Forces cargo loader; it’s Navy issue. Shipboard equipment,” he said.

“Sure?” one of the others asked.

“I’m a navy brat; I grew up on ships,” he said. “S2U, get an ID for that serial code,” he said.

[ID match. One MMEH4 cargo loader (unmanned). Equipment registered to BN-SV Ravi.]

“Yes,” he said, trying to stay calm. “That means the Ravi was here in the attack. And now it’s missing. That may be where we need to look to find our people, if they were taken as hostages.”

Already, in his head he was composing the emergency report he was going to be sending back to his mother, back on Suionetheod. This wasn’t just a missing ship or a late report from a backwater base any more. It hadn’t been for quite a while now.

This had been enemy action.

...

It was about an hour after her brief talk with Fate that Precia’s Device alerted her to a message from Linith arriving. She made her excuses to Alicia and left to review it privately in her office, where her expression grew grimmer and grimmer as she listened to her familiar’s description of what had happened and her analysis of what they had seen. Her lips pursed as the cat-woman frankly summarised her suspicions, and she snapped the message off as soon as it was finished, standing up from the desk sharply and beginning to pace as anger and frustration made her terse and snappish.

Why this? Why now? This was the _antithesis_ of what she had been hoping for when she had allowed the Takamachi girl to go back to that accursed planet, and if her daughters found out...

Precia’s lips pursed into a tight line. To go to Nanoha’s aid, if Linith’s suspicions were accurate, would be to put Alicia into life-threatening danger. Again. That was an action she could not tolerate under any circumstances. And yet... she well remembered her daughter’s response when Nanoha had discovered her mother’s injury. If the two of them caught onto what their friend might be facing, they would undoubtedly wish to go and involve themselves, and to deny them might well damage her relationship with Alicia irreparably, not to mention deal a heavy blow to the loyalty Fate and Arf had towards her. And preventing Nanoha’s own familiar from setting out to help her mistress if she knew what threats Nanoha might be facing would likely require nothing short of death or grievous injury.

All in all, had Precia been a woman of less reserve and restraint, she might well have lashed out and hit something. As it was, her self-control and the ever-present spectre of her failing health kept her from expressing the initial surge of annoyance with a well-place volley of shooting spells. The girls did _not_ need to find her coughing up blood, especially without Linith here to tend to her condition. Instead, she merely hissed furiously and took several deep breaths before schooling her features back to an icy mask.

Plan. She needed a plan, a course of action. Clearly, she would need to keep the information from the girls. If Linith was correct, and fortune smiled on them, then the whole affair could be resolved quickly and with a minimum of fuss. But planning for fortune was never a good idea. Precia pursed her lips, thinking quickly. If matters... escalated, then her options became very limited. Keeping Fate and Alicia in the dark was a temporary stopgap at best; they would eventually begin to wonder why Nanoha had not returned quickly. That meant she would either need to find a reason that would satisfy them – difficult – or come up with another way to... deal with the issue before it became a problem.

Crossing the room quickly back to the desk, Precia began to compose a message to Linith, outlining her primary plan. Her mind raced through alternatives, and she pulled up a couple of reference screens to skim over. Every word only deepened her scowl.

A scowl that flickered when pounding fists battered the locked door. Her eyes flickered over to it as her mind automatically sorted through possibilities. Fate would never dare make such a racket, Vesta and Arf rarely approached her directly, and that left only...

“Alicia,” she called, frowning. “I thought I asked you not to disturb me while I was working.”

“I know mama, but this is really really important! Like, _really_ important! Nanoha’s in trouble!”

Violet eyes narrowed sharply, and the door unlocked with a wave of Precia’s hand. She swivelled in her chair, taking in the small committee standing outside her office. Alicia was in front, looking distressed. Fate was just behind her, intent and focused, jointly holding back Vesta along with Arf. The grey-haired familiar was in her child form, and clearly upset, her tail lashing in agitation.

“We just got a message back from her,” explained Fate. “She says that there’s at least one powerful mage there – powerful enough to defeat her like I did, back when we first met. And she also said that she thinks it might be the...” she hesitated, glancing across at Vesta and tightening her grip on the girl’s arm, “... the Book of Darkness.”

Raw fury whiplashed through Precia for a moment, and it clearly showed in her expression. Fate shrank back a step instinctively, eyes widening in terror. But Alicia, sweet little Alicia, just stared up at her in confusion, unable to understand why her mother looked so angry. With a determined effort of will, Precia leashed the anger and stuffed it down, blanketing it under a wave of ice-cold control.

So. This was it, then. If the girls had the faintest inkling of what that particular Lost Logia was capable of – and she knew that Fate, at least, would have looked it up as soon as she’d finished the message – then any hope of keeping them away from the situation was gone. Now all that was left was damage control.

“The Book of Darkness?” she said, pursing her lips. “I see. Linith sent me a message with similar suspicions, though she was far less certain. The odds of running across that abomination are low in the extreme, after all.”

“But if it is the Book...” Fate started hesitantly – evidently still shaky from Precia’s silent burst of anger. “If it is, we can’t afford to just... stay here. It destroys worlds! Nanoha’s family...” Her eyes flickered down to Alicia, and Precia almost winced. The girl had a point. She _did_ owe the Takamachi girl a debt, it was true. And that was disregarding the fact that Alicia would revolt if she tried to say ‘no’.

That didn’t mean she couldn’t gently steer them away from the idea, though. Linith had reported that Nanoha was unsympathetic to any thought of letting the TSAB handle things for her, but perhaps her friends could convince her differently.

“Very well,” she decided gravely, inclining her head in a gracious nod. “As you say, we cannot in good conscience leave such a horror to rampage unchecked. I will arrange a less strenuous form of transport and send a message back to Linith, informing her of our arrival.” She tapped her fingers reflectively on the desk, tilting her head in a show of thought. “And perhaps we could consider alerting the TSAB to the situation, after seeing it for ourselves. They, undoubtedly, can bring sufficient force to bear on the issue, if our worst fears are true.”

Fate and Vesta both made motions to object, but she forestalled them with a raised hand. “I know it seems contrary to our purpose to involve them in this, but consider. They _have_ put down the Book before – on several occasions, though never without cost. They have a vested interest in protecting inhabited worlds, even Unadministered ones. And if they did become involved, we could potentially retreat from the conflict and allow them to deal with it safely, intervening only as needed.” She shot a significant look at Fate as she mentioned safety, and the young girl hesitated, comprehension dawning in her eyes.

Precia shrugged. “Well, it is an option we can consider. For now, I shall contact Linith and make the necessary excuses to the school... a family emergency, perhaps, linked to that which drew Nanoha away. And then I will see what transport is in the area, while you girls pack.” She gave them a serious look. “This may become a long trip. Choose what you intend to bring with care.”

They nodded and hurried off. Sighing, and gesturing the door closed and locked behind them, Precia rested a cool hand against her forehead and began to massage her temples. Another quiet cough forced its way out, accompanied by a wince. Being close to Linith again would certainly be one positive factor of going to help, if nothing else. Soon, she would need to go through the rigmarole of contacting the school, a ship – possibly Hektor’s again, if he was in the area – and Linith. But for now, she was exhausted. A short rest, for now, was something she could afford.

After all, it might be the last one she’d have the opportunity for in some time.

...


	4. Chapter Three

In the deepest heart of the Yagami household, behind fearsome wards and layers of security that would make NATO feel a crushing sense of inadequacy, a council of war crucial to the very survival of humanity was taking place presided over by the greatest minds of a generation.

Or at least, that’s how Hayate Yagami, nine-year old master of the Book of Darkness, liked to think of it. Actually, they had just drawn the curtains and taken the duvet off her bed so that they could use it as a table. But however much more... well, _dignified_ other war-rooms might possibly have been, _they_ didn’t possess vital and secret information on the magical threat to the entire world. 

They didn’t have magical guardian warriors, either. Which was really, _really_ cool. Her super-special magical guardian warriors had appeared from nowhere about six months ago, and everything had got so much better with them around. She was still ill, but first she had met Chikaze in the really scary incident in the hospital with the zombies, and then just about when the two of them had been scared out of their minds, why, she had turned out to have four magical people whose job it was to protect her.

This was evidence, in Hayate’s mind, that the world was a fundamentally fair and just place. Of course there were special protector-people to protect people from magical zombies. Why wouldn’t there be?

And so the last six months had been some of the happiest she could remember. She had a friend – indeed, she had two, because Vita, one of her protectors, was her friend and looked about her age too. Zafira, who was kind of a werewolf, but the good kind because he could just turn into a strange-looking wolf whenever he wanted rather than being controlled by the moon, was both helpful and was a pet, and she had wanted a pet – a proper one, not just like her hamsters – for as long as she had remembered. Shamal and Signum, meanwhile, the first kind and motherly, the other calm and really cool, both did nice things for her and... and it was like she had a family. A real one, not just a distant uncle; something she only barely recalled from the charcoal-sketched memories of her early childhood.

She still cooked for them, though, because all of them apart from Zafira were utterly terrible at cooking. And she really liked how they always seemed to be so grateful that she did nice things for them too.

But the current planning session she was having with her friend was not a nice thing. No, it was a council of war to talk about the defences they would prepare to a most deadly threat to all of Japan! And it would remain a top-secret war meeting, even if it was taking place next to an elderly teddy bear – who they had sworn to secrecy – and the latest volume of _Fruits Basket_. 

Which, she realised belatedly, her co-conspirator was quietly tugging towards her bag.

“Hey! Chikaze! Stop that!”

“Spoilsport,” Chikaze grumbled. “You’ve already read it, anyway.” But she put the manga down and focused back on the scattered pieces of paper that littered the bed, its duvet and pillows having been exiled to the corner of the room in a crumpled heap. “Okay, fine. So what have we got?” She shuffled through the sheets of paper.

There were quite a lot of them to shuffle through, and this was because some parts of the heap dated back almost six months. Nobody could accuse the two Hayate Yagami and Chikaze Yoshida of not being women of independence or action, and after that horrible day in the hospital where the dead had walked and the sky had burned, they had taken steps against it happening again.

As they were respectively nine and eight years old, they were admittedly somewhat limited in their choice of steps, and so they had mostly opted to tackle the research side of things so far.

“Well...” Hayate said, drawing the word out, “most of our research was useless – and also really scary – because we can’t get our hands on guns. Or fire them properly even if we could. But we _do_ know what their weakpoints are! So we can tell Signum and everyone about that, and the other things we discovered! They’re my super magical guardians, and so to protect them from the ever-present threat of zombies we must now record all the information we have painstakingly – and scarily – gathered!”

“Right,” nodded Chikaze, grabbing a blank page and scribbling ‘zombie defence plan stuff’ at the top. “Go for the head, or sometimes the heart, right?” she checked. “Head is safer, though.” Hayate nodded, and she noted it down. “Right. Okay, what else?”

“Umm... ah, there was that one English film; that was really useful!” Hayate grabbed one of the pieces of paper, covered in painstakingly-taken notes. “Okay, ready? First off, the most important thing is to _notice that there are zombies_. That’s really crucial. Underline that.”

Nodding solemnly, Chikaze did so. She, too, had noticed how it normally took people about ten to twenty minutes of an hour-and-a-half long film to come to that conclusion. So they were already ahead of the curve!

Hayate’s new friends were useful in more ways than one. Hayate and Chikaze couldn’t get the important research films themselves, because silly adults thought that children their age shouldn’t be watching them. But her knights could get films _for_ her, they had discovered. And yes, they were scary films. But they weren’t as scary as knowing that zombies were really real, for real, and could come and attack you at _any time_.

“Second... yeah, second is that if you’re bitten, you have to tell someone. Even if you really don’t want to! Because they don’t have to kill you right away, and you can keep helping and everything, but they should know that when you do fall over and die, you’ll come back as a zombie!”

Chikaze frowned. “Why do people ever try to hide that, anyway? It’s _stupid_. If they’re going to die anyway, they should at least...” Her expression faltered for a moment, before she continued, “... they should at least... plan for it. You know?” She ran a pale hand across the short pink fuzz of her hair, and brought it down again to stare pensively at the veins she could pick out individually.

Hayate gave her a sympathetic look. An understanding one. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Yeah, I know.”

“I’ve...” Chikaze started, and then cut off, glancing up almost fearfully. But Hayate’s look was compassionate, and she hesitantly continued. “I told my mum and dad that if... you know, then I want my organs donated to someone else, and the rest of me recycled. So a tree can feed off me or something. Th-they cried a lot, but... but I think that’s better than just being c-cremated, don’t you? To help other people, and plants, and stuff? It’ll be like... like the leukaemia hasn’t won completely. And, I mean, _I_ won’t be there anymore. It won’t be _me_. I’ll be...”

Hayate leaned over and squeezed her hand. “You’ll be _fine_ ,” she promised. “Just fine. The doctors said you’d been improving, right? That weird stuff Shamal’s been doing to help you, it’s been helping?”

“Well... not with the sickness itself, just with feeling better and less tired all the time,” Chikaze corrected. “But yeah. And they did say that the more you feel like you can beat it, the more likely you are to.” She smiled shyly at her friend, feeling a little more optimistic.

“Hey, you two?” came a voice from outside the door. “Hungry? I have cookies and juice for you, if you want them.”

The two conspirators traded interested glances. “Just a minute!” called Hayate as they hastily swept their papers into Chikaze’s bag and hid it under the bed. Plans secure, they attempted to adopt innocent-looking expressions. “Okay,” Hayate called, “you can come in now!”

The door swung open, nudged by Vita’s foot, and the short knight came in bearing a tray loaded down with snacks. She took in the studiously innocuous poses and the duvet piled against the far wall, and dryly raised an eyebrow at Hayate. “Do I even want to know what you’ve been up to?” she asked, with a hint of amusement.

“Wow,” Chikaze said, eyes widening as she took in Vita’s appearance. “What happened to _you?_ ” Her surprise was understandable – the whole left-hand side of the redhead’s jaw was an ugly bruise-purple, and her words were ever-so-slightly slurred from the swelling. At Chikaze’s blunt query, she scowled in irritation, and Hayate giggled, though she mollified Vita with a sympathetic look as well.

“It was an accident with a croquet mallet,” Hayate explained. “Apparently she was too close and not paying attention when one of the people at her club swung, and... well, you can see the result. Shamal said that she should be fine in a few days, but that it was a really unlucky hit that got her in just the wrong place.” She held her sympathetic look for a few more seconds before a teasing grin forced its way to the fore. “Years of fighting experience, useless before the power of a croquet mallet! Hee! They must be really powerful weapons! Is that why Graf Eisen looks like one?”

Vita tried to sulk disdainfully, but a smile tugged at her lips despite her best efforts. “It was a stupid, rookie mistake,” she muttered. “I just wasn’t paying attention, that was all. And I’ll have you know I have _centuries_ of combat experience, not just years. Heck, I’ve probably spent more time fighting than you have alive.”

Hayate’s face fell at the reminder of her knights’ pasts, and Vita hastily changed the subject. “Anyway, come over here. Whatever you two have been carting your duvet around the room for, it’s made your hair a mess again. Let me brush it out for you.”

This suited Hayate perfectly, and she rolled over to her bedside cabinet to locate a hairbrush. While she rooted around in the drawers, Chikaze tilted her head, taking a seat on the bed and leaning back against the headboard. “Really centuries?” she asked curiously. “And you remember all of it?” She knew that the Wolkenritter were magical, of course – even had she not been Hayate’s best and only friend, there hadn’t really been any way to explain away the sudden appearance of four ‘relatives’ who Hayate had never spoken of before. But she didn’t know much, and was always interested in new details about them.

“Ah ha!” crowed Hayate, before Vita could respond. She came up with the hairbrush and presented it to Vita, then expertly spun her wheelchair around to face away from the bed. Putting the tray to one side, Vita sat down on it, legs dangling off the side, and pulled her a little closer before starting to brush her master’s hair in smooth, even strokes.

“Yes, centuries, but not all of it,” she corrected. “I mean, we remember a lot, but I bet you don’t remember stuff from when you were two.” She frowned, carefully teasing at a knot until it untangled itself. “It’s not quite the same, I guess, but we do forget stuff. Anything too far back just... fogs over. It all blends together after a while. I couldn’t tell you much more about Ancient Belka than anyone else could, even though we were active back then. I think. I do remember fighting a Sankt Kaiser - the great uncle of the last one, I think. I lost. Though... that probably doesn’t mean much to either of you. Huh. Well, you’d both be totally awed if you knew who I was talking about.”

“You were fighting someone?” asked Chikaze, taking in Vita’s short stature. “ _You?_ I’m almost as tall as you are, and I’m only eight! And poorly, to boot!”

Vita stared down her nose at the young cancer patient. “I was bigger back then,” she said in a flat tone, which shifted to haughtiness as she went on, “and I assure you, I’m more than capable even like this. Don’t ever judge a mage by her size.”

The sound of the front door opening filtered up from downstairs, and Hayate took the opportunity to divert the conversation back to its original course. “So you can’t remember everything, but you still remember lots?” she asked, tipping her head back to allow the redhead better access and drumming her fingers idly. “How far back does it start getting foggy? I can remember back to... I dunno, six or so, maybe.”

“About a century is when things get really hazy,” Vita replied casually.

Hayate jerked around with a strangled sound and stared at her. Chikaze just stared, eyes wide. Vita glanced at them both and shrugged.

“What? I told you we were old. Though... uh...” her eyes found something else to look at, avoiding Hayate’s eyes. “You’re the best master I remember having. Ever. The others would agree.”

That drew a blush from Hayate and an “aww” from Chikaze, and the young master of the Book eased back into her chair to allow Vita to go back to what she had been doing. The brush moving smoothly through her hair made her feel drowsy and carefree, and her eyes started to droop closed. “Do you know other languages, then?” she heard Chikaze ask. “I mean, I bet they don’t speak Japanese in your Dimension Space. Did that come from Hayate, or are you just super-fast learners or something?”

Vita chuckled. “No, we’re not that quick at learning. I think we sort of absorb the language from whoever has the Book, even when we don’t activate. Well, it might be that the Book learns anything the master does, and we just get the language as a sort of side effect. They don’t seem to fade, though. I know at least forty.” She paused. “Course, most of those are dead now. So there’s that.”

Hayate woke up considerably at this revelation. “That’s still cool!” she squealed, bouncing in excitement and then wincing as the movement pulled her hair painfully against the brush halfway through a stroke. She stayed still to let Vita smooth it out again, and then resumed. “Say something to me in another language!”

“Not just something like ‘something’, either!” put in Chikaze eagerly. “Say something the people who spoke it would have said! Like, something magical-alien-y!”

“Hmm...” Vita thought for a minute, and scowled playfully when Hayate felt out behind the wheelchair to nudge her on the leg. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking! It’s hard to come up with something, alright? Let’s see... oh, I know.” She cleared her throat, pausing briefly to wince and rub her jaw, and began to speak in a melodic, flowing tone that made Hayate think of falling water and the pictures of ancient temples she’d seen from Greece and Italy. Whatever her knight was saying, it was fairly short, and she was done within four or five brush-strokes.

“Huh,” Chikaze breathed. “That was really pretty. What was it?”

“Ah... Galean High Court.” Craning round to see what had caused the hesitation, and why Vita had stopped brushing her hair, Hayate raised an eyebrow when she found the girl blushing faintly. Before she could interrogate her, though, a white-haired head poked around the doorframe.

“What’s this?” Zafira asked lightly, amused. “Do my ears detect the strains of poetry? From you, Vita? I thought you hated that sort of thing.”

“Be quiet!” snapped Vita, blushing harder. Chikaze and Hayate both leaned forward, eager eyes following this promising new development. Zafira’s smile widened, and he slipped into the room with a wink at Hayate.

“And Royal pronouns, too? You could be executed for addressing someone not of the royal line like that. Which I’m pretty sure our master isn’t, no offence intended.” He nodded at Hayate, who was beginning to grin herself.

“Were you calling me a princess, Vita? That’s really sweet of you! But you shouldn’t have broken the rules like that. In punishment, you have to translate the rest for me! What else did you say?”

Vita mumbled something unintelligible, and shot Zafira a glare of pure poison. He didn’t notice, as he was holding a hand over his mouth and trying to disguise his snickering. Given the way his shoulders were shaking slightly, it wasn’t working very well.

“Come on, Vita!” pleaded Chikaze, “What was it? Tell us! Come on! Please? Please? _Please?_ ” Joining in on the chorus, Hayate spun around and grabbed her hand, forcing her Knight to look into big, pleading eyes. Her cheeks were by now as red as her hair, but she couldn’t refuse her master anything, not when she looked like that.

“I was... complimenting your eyes,” she muttered, “and your looks in general, and how kind you are.”

In the brief silence that followed, Zafira appeared to undergo a sudden and severe coughing fit, and Chikaze could faintly be heard gleefully muttering something that sounded like “so adorable”.

But Hayate beamed at her, and for a moment the mortification lifted. “That’s really sweet of you!” she repeated, and pulled Vita into a hug with deceptive strength. “I have the best Knights ever. And you’re really pretty too, Vita! And nice, when you let yourself be.”

Leaning on the wall briefly for balance, Zafira regained his composure from the abrupt and inexplicable coughing fit with only minor difficulty. Off-handedly, and with an air of studious innocence that was far more successful than those the girls had attempted only a few minutes earlier, he remarked, “What she’s not telling you, incidentally, is that the lines she quoted are originally from one of the more famous love poems of the era.”

The look of mischievous glee on both young faces was entirely worth the silent promise of an agonising death that Vita threw him as he hastily retreated.

...

_‘Enforcer Harlaown! We’ve got something!’_

Those words broke two frustrating, aggravating days. Three days of paranoia and uncertainty, slowly sweeping the empty facility. Three tense, demanding days, dealing with the automated base defences which had managed to injure one of the team. Three days of fielding questions from Suionetheod and beyond for which they didn’t have the answers. Admiral Harlaown was still a day’s travel out, though at least the ping on the communications with her was getting less and less as she approached.

So far, they had confirmed that the Ravi had been present. That was about all the information they had. The main computer networks had been expertly subverted, wiped and then smashed; anything useful lost irretrievably by whatever the attackers had done to them. It had shown a scary knowledge of TSAB databases, and was a decidedly ominous portent for the case, not to mention their chances of finding the missing garrison.

 _‘The sunk-cache?’_ he sent back.

_‘No. Contact request... standard protocols. Triangulating it to on-planet... okay, let me just... yeah, okay, the map has an icon for a weather station there. Checking it... yes, it notes that there’s a small agricultural set-up there.’_

_‘Prepare a connection,’_ Chrono ordered. _‘I’ll talk to them; see if they know anything.’_

A thought was enough to have his barrier jacket return to its normal Enforcer black, the barriers flicking away from the blotchy tan-grey he had been using on this dusty hellhole of a world – Kaisers, he hated this place, though of course he tried not to show it in front of the others – and he took a moment to check his hair. Well, he couldn’t do anything about that.

He opened the communications window, and waited while S2U handled the connection protocols.

[Secure link established,] his Device stated.

“Good,” he said, settling his face in a professional expression. “Begin conversation.”

The window flashed to colour, before resolve into the face of a man who looked to be in his fifties. His salt and pepper beard was braided with bronze ties; his head was shaved. He was wearing a loose, light-coloured top, and sitting in front of a bookshelf. “Uh, hello?” the man asked. “Is the sound working?”

“Yes, I can hear you. Enforcer Chrono Harlaown, Bureau Navy,” Chrono introduced himself.

“An enforcer?” the man said, eyes widening slightly. “Oh, yes! I remember you! You were in that briefing packet we got... what was it, a year or so ago? I’m Vaan Maklecorgh... well, well, yes. I’m the one who’s technically in charge of... we’re an environmental monitoring station, but we do try to run things fairly. I guess I just count as the person who sends in the reports when we have to. It’s good to hear that they called you in so quickly! I just hope you can find out who’s behind the attacks!”

Chrono paused. Blinked. “Excuse me,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “The... attacks?”

The man, too, in turn blinked. “You’re not here about them?” he asked, face falling. “Why are you here?”

Chrono resisted the urge to massage his temples. “We’re responding to a failed security verification from the training facility,” he said, picking his words carefully. He didn’t want to give away information accidentally. “There have been attacks?”

“The people at Livitus base didn’t tell you?” Vaan asked. “They said they were going to be sending word back to Runcorn about them! Oh, when I get my hands on...”

“It’s rather more serious than that,” Chrono said. He pursed his lips. “I’ll come explain in person; if there have been other attacks, we should look into this. Send your coordinates; in the meantime, please can you collect together all and any information on them, so we can take a look at it.”

It was the work of a few minutes to come to an agreement with the leader of his backup squad; he would take three mages with him, in case this was some trap, and they’d teleport in at a safe distance and fly the rest of the way. If there had already been attacks on mages on this world... well, at the very least, there might be evidence. Something which was sorely lacking in this abandoned base.

“I want a nice, clean deployment here,” he told the three who would be coming with him. “If this proves to be an ambush, we break off immediately, disengage, and fall back to the designated rally point. We teleport in aerial formation, and make sure your barrier jackets are set up for a hot entry.”

None of them even rolled their eyes at the way he was going over basic protocol. This abandoned base, with no traces left by the vanished inhabitants or whatever had made them disappear was disconcerting enough as it stood. As they prepared for the teleport, there were prayers on multiple lips.

It was earlier in the day above the environmental monitoring facility, the large yellow sun of Type-3 worlds not having reached its zenith yet. Heat haze hung over the parched land, and the native plants were dry and scrubby. A sparkling river could be seen from the aerial position of the mages, but when magnified the water was far below the maximum of the banks.

The facility was rather larger than Chrono had expected from the first mention of it. It was in the middle of a section of cleared fields and small copses, the faintly visible haze of a low-level barrier marking the divide between the local environment and the Type-1 ecology the human colonists had brought with them. Crops grew in neat circles, their irrigation systems puffing out faint white clouds in the heat. Around the standardised Bureau designs of the main structures were an assortment of civilian houses, many of the made of local woods.

“Hmm,” Chrono observed, taking in the sights. “Maybe... a hundred, a hundred and fifty inhabitants, looking at the size? Looks like a moderately-sized village from up here.”

“Population data says one-twenty two inhabitants as of last census,” one of the female mages said.

“Bigger than you’d think,” the other woman said, “but then again, I guess in backwaters like this they just clump together. It’s probably worth it just for the stable power supply.”

“Let’s take a look,” Chrono ordered. “And stay alert, in case it’s a trap.”

If it was a trap, it was a particularly well-disguised one. Landing on a grassy patch close to the central compound, the Bureau mages were greeted by Dr Vaan Maklecorgh, the man Chrono had talked to earlier, who in person was revealed to be a somewhat overweight bear of a man, towering over all of them. He took them to his cluttered office, moving books and disassembled Device-circuitry off seats to open somewhere for them to sit. They waited while he brewed some coffee in the noisy machine which sat on his desk.

“This is an environmental monitoring station,” he explained, looking out the window. “We’ve got... oh, a few thousand people scattered up and down the coast here, and so one of the things we do is keep an eye on how the local Type-3 ecosystem is handling any introductions of Type-1 stuff. There’s some Dark Age ruins over up North, in a protein-contaminated zone, and ‘bout fifty years back, a team dug up most of them. I was just a lad at the time, but they gave a talk on how this was right at the border of Alhazredian space and so the Fall happened before they really got set-up. Looks they abandoned this place, or maybe all died, but the local environment’s still damaged from the failed terraforming they did, even after thousands of years. You should see the satellites’ views of some areas. What a mess!”

“You have satellites up?” Chrono asked, perking up. “What kind?”

Oh, we have a few up, for weather purposes,” the older man said. “We tracked the Ravi’s approach in on them. It’s kind of important, you know,” he said, shrugging in a self-effacing manner, “given that’s how we get the stuff we can’t make here.”

“What ground-resolution do they have?” Chrono said, intently. 

The man winced. “Not too good,” he admitted. “They’re weather sats, and... well, clouds are hard to miss. You’ve got a big grey mass, by the way. Not surprising, really; the rainy season’s a local year late all over South Chaken, but it had to show up.” 

“Oh?” Chrono said, mildly surprised. There had only been a few wisps of cloud in the deep blue sky last time he had checked.

“Yeah, it’s a biggie, rolling in off the Paenech. A storm’s heading your way.” The coffee machine chimed, and he poured himself a black coffee. Chipped mug in hand, he started to explain.

“When it began,” he started, after the formalities were over, “we didn’t realise what was going on. Why would we? First Acexi fell ill... she’s the local doctor. She was listless, tired, sick in the morning. Well, you know how flus can be. And when more people came down with the same thing, it was just a bug going through. It happens sometimes, you know, especially since we’d had a TSAB training squad stop by in the week before and we often pick up sniffles.” 

Chrono nodded. It was sadly true that diseases jumped so easily from world to world. There were vast vaccination programmes in the Core Worlds trying to keep the teeming masses of mankind from infecting each other and Bureau Health Agency tried its best to keep backwater worlds vaccinated against major diseases, but it was never enough.

“So more people came down with the same thing. Hell of a thing, it was; like the worst flu ever. No nausea, but you just didn’t have the energy for anything. Wiped you out for a few days, and then you were back on your feet. Everyone took ill in the night, but... well, that happens. Nothing was triggering any break-in alarms or anything like that and there wasn’t any signs of... you know, violence or anything. But eventually enough people fell ill that we had to call in Livitus base, and their doctor came over here. By then, quite a few people had recovered, but he couldn’t find anything wrong. And he was just running some tests and that’s... well, he found out that it wasn’t a disease. Something, someone was draining our cores.”

Chrono’s mouth felt as dry as the dusty lands outside. “Are... you sure?” he asked, warily.

“That’s what he said, and we got the reports from her. And then he came down with it, too, and that was proof that something was going on, because he’d been keeping a biohazard jacket up all the time. So it wasn’t a disease. And he said his Device had been tampered with, because it just had...” the man spread his hands, “missing time. No records, no monitoring, nothing.”

“How long ago was this?” Chrono asked. The killer question.

“Almost... two weeks ago. Let me just...”

Linker core draining. Capacity to subvert TSAB systems. Oh dear. Oh dear. “I need everything you have,” Chrono ordered. “Security footage, the doctor’s reports, everything. I’ll need to interview the people who have been attacked and...”

His Device chimed, and Chrono answered. _‘What is it? I’m in the middle of something.’_

 _‘We’ve uncovered the sunk-cache for the base,’_ the lieutenant said, promptly. _‘We’re going to need you back as mission lead for this and to secure the evidence.’_

Chrono massaged his temples. _‘Any sign of tampering?’_ he sent back.

_‘Not as far as we can tell!’_

The Enforcer clambered up to his feet, brushing off the dust that got everywhere in this forsaken backwater. _‘All units, reinforce the perimeter around the sunk cache,’_ he instructed. _‘Chu,’_ he sent to the silver-white-haired technical expert, _‘make sure we’re ready to send everything from it back. I don’t want anyone getting their hands on it before it gets to the Asura. We’re headed straight back!’_ He nodded at the scientist. “We’re going to have to delay the interviews, but I’ll take all the data you have right now!”

The man blinked.

“At the double!”

Because if they were facing what he feared they were, they were going to need all the information they could get.

...

“The Book of Darkness,” Precia began, “is what we may be facing, in a worst-case scenario.” With a wave of her hand, she called up an image of the thing to hover above the table. It was a menacing, ominous tome, hardbound in dark brown and bearing a pointed golden cross on its cover.

“It is unlikely that we stand opposed to the true Lost Logia,” she continued. “In the hopeful and more likely case that we do not, however, our foes will still likely be imitating it in an attempt to capitalise on its formidable reputation. Therefore, we will assume the worst, and plan to face the Book itself. There is little information about it that is certain, but what there is, I will share.”

She looked at the people seated around the table. There were seven of them, though with the familiars in their animal forms, the small room was not as cramped as it might have been. To her left, Arf and Fate watched attentively, one sitting on the lap of the other. Vesta lounged on the table surface beside them, though to her credit the little grey kitten was being remarkably quiet and well-behaved by her standards, either out of worry for Nanoha or intimidation.

One possible source of that intimidation sat to Precia’s right, the low hum of machinery audible even when she was still. Precia wasn’t sure what had happened to the... well, she was _probably_ a girl; or had been. She was relatively sure Ićeoak was a female name, at least. It was hard to tell under the bulky, brassy suit that covered about half her body – a life support system, if Precia was any judge, and from what she had seen of the body underneath, it was no normal affliction it was compensating for. She sat still as a stone, with only the movement of her breathing to tell that she was alive.

And finally, across the table from Precia, sat the first mate and the engineer. Benedict and Wilhelm, both of whom Precia knew from previous association with Hektor. Benedict was the larger man, and could have been handsome in a sort of rugged way were it not for an old burn mark twisting the skin around his jaw. His long coat and tough, practical clothes were a contrast to the industrial Jacket of his partner, whose shorter messy hair was mostly covered by a hard-tech facemask pulled up out of the way. They sat flanking a window to the bridge. Hektor, naturally, had refused to leave the ship’s controls, regardless of the fact that their course was set and he wasn’t strictly needed there.

The old smuggler-pirate glared at her through the link, gimlet eyes sharp in a pockmarked face. “I’d have been decidedly less enthusiastic about accepting this job,” he grumbled, “if you’d come clean with all the details ahead of time.”

Precia waved him off irritably. “I like this no more than you, Hektor,” she snapped. “But you and yours will be perfectly safe. Alicia and I will not be entering affairs directly, and indeed will be staying as far from the conflict as possible. Your ship and your crew will go nowhere near any potential combat. Merely act as a staging post for us, four or five dimensions out.”

It was clear he still wasn’t pleased with the idea. But he sat back with a noise that was half grunt, half scoff, and let her continue. She did so, bringing up four vague silhouettes. Three were human, of average height and indeterminate gender. The fourth was some kind of wolf or large dog.

“The Book itself is only a threat towards the final stages of its cycle, which we will be taking great pains to avoid. Therefore, the primary danger comes from its guardians, the so-called Wolkenritter. There are four templates; the Blade, the Breaker, the Healer and the Hound. They are released with the Book’s activation, and begin to core-rip mages to feed the Book itself. It seems they are only able to do this to a given mage once – though I would not recommend allowing them to – and once they reach some critical amount, the Book seems to go berserk and generally devastates the region. On its last activation, almost ten years ago, it took a TSAB warship to bring it down. The ship itself was lost in the process, along with all hands.”

Silence rang out from her audience as she concluded. “It is these, or imitators of the same, that have apparently chosen to target Nanoha’s homeworld.”

She turned to pin Fate, Arf and Vesta with a hard gaze. “Let me make this perfectly clear. If this is, in fact, the Book of Darkness itself, our best course by far would be to anonymously alert the Bureau and retreat. The Cloud Knights of the Book are ancient and powerful combatants, highly experienced in their respective roles and entirely willing to kill, unlike the TSAB. They are not opponents to take lightly.”

 _’If Nanoha’s in trouble, they better not take_ us _lightly!’_ Vesta put in, her tail puffing up and her fur standing on end angrily. Violet eyes flickered down to pin her, and she abruptly became rather smaller again.

“So noted,” replied Precia calmly, “but I will remind you that Alicia’s safety is a factor I am loathe to risk.” The little girl in question had been carefully excluded from the discussion, and sequestered in the rather poky room she shared with Arf and Vesta.

“I’ll admit, I’ve heard rumours, and I was a kid when it turned up last, but beyond the basics I don’t know much about the thing, and nothing beyond the horror stories about these guardians,” Benedict spoke up. He leaned forward, propping his chin on his hands. “I’m guessing they got their little nicknames for a reason?”

Precia nodded curtly. “The guardians have been observed to look different with every incarnation of the Book, so physical descriptions are meaningless – hence the relative ease of imitation. Their weapons and methodology, however, stay roughly the same.” She twitched her fingers, and one of the figures expanded, the others vanishing. “The Blade is the greatest threat in direct combat. Primarily a sword-user, though it has been recorded with a number of bladed weapons as well as the bow, and possessed of a strong fire-affinity. Its estimated rank is S+, and I will not bother to list off its recorded kills, because we would be here for hours. It will suffice to say that it includes a Sankt Kaiser.” She looked at Fate and the familiars again, with a hint of what might have been concern in her eyes. “I trust I will only need to state this once. If you find yourself facing this Knight, run. Even you, Fate, have very little hope of anything but survival. I would estimate that you are faster than it is, which gives you a good chance of escape, but attempting to actually engage it will only end one way.”

Fate nodded solemnly, while Vesta mewled quietly in distress.

“I will emphasise again that the Wolkenritter are the defensive system of a Class 1 Lost Logia,” Precia went on. “They were programmed with the code of honour of the Belkan Knights, but do not mistake that for anything more human. They are attack programmes slaved to the will of the Book’s master. They may try to fool you into believing they are people. They have done so before, in previous incarnations. It is merely a ruse to get closer to you to harvest your linker core. Every action they take is designed to maximise their efficiency in harvesting. Mages that have trusted them in the past have discovered this the hard way. I would very much appreciate it if you did not follow their example.”

Another nod, and resolve crystallised in Fate’s eyes. “I understand,” she said, already focused on her unspoken new objective.

“Good. Next, the Breaker.” Another small wave, and the anonymous figure’s weapon shifted to a warhammer. “It has been recorded with hammers, maces and various other blunt weapons, and is known to use projectile ranged weapon systems. Unlike the Blade, its area is not combat specifically, though it still holds an estimated AAA+ rank in battle. Rather, it is a barrier-breaker, and an extremely good one.”

 _‘Damn,’_ growled Arf. _‘I’m going to want to avoid them, then.’_

 _‘Huh?’_ Vesta blinked up and looked around in confusion. _‘Wait, what’s a barrier-breaker? I mean, other than something that... uh... breaks barriers.’_

 _‘It means someone who specialises in smashing through barriers, shields, walls... any kind of defence, magic or not. They’re basically the counter for defensive casters like me,’_ Arf explained sullenly, still growling. _’Well, Fate should be able to out-manoeuvre it, if it comes to that. Just make sure Nanoha doesn’t try to block it head on, and stay at range where it can’t hit you.’_

Vesta nodded rapidly, committing this to memory.

“There is less data on the other two, as they take a less active role.” The third and fourth figures, unarmed human and canine, grew to hover above the table. “However, from what has been observed, the Healer is predominantly a support mage, and the Hound is some kind of familiar-derived bodyguard, focusing on unarmed combat such as Strike Arts and defensive magic. Of the two, I would actually rate the Healer as proportionally more dangerous to us, as it almost certainly has detection magic and thus the greatest chance of finding us. We will have to be careful and take measures to avoid its notice.”

“Hold on.” It was Wilhlem who spoke now, frowning. “There’s another one, isn’t there? The Wraith?”

Precia frowned minutely. “Yes... well, perhaps. Certain older records do indeed indicate a fifth guardian, generally agreed to be some kind of assassin focused on stealth and espionage. The Wraith, or Killer.” She nodded at Vesta, whose ears had perked up with interest. “Indeed, not dissimilar to your talents, my dear. Though of a decidedly more lethal bent. However, no such Knight has been seen and verified in any of the past four incarnations of the Book, which are the only ones the Bureau has records of. It may be that they were not utilised, or alternatively that the function has somehow been excised from the Book entirely. Or, given the older records only note its presence at the end of an instantiation, it may be something unlocked when the Book has been completed.”

“This all seems a little beside the point.” The voice of the armoured figure was oddly pitched and slightly slurred, with the tell-tale lag of a translation program in effect. “Surely, the best course would be to target the Master of the thing and avoid fighting the guardians entirely? Kill them, and the Book will leave, no?”

Precia’s eyes narrowed sharply at that, and she heard a squeak and a sharp intake of breath from across the table. A quick glance showed Fate looking pale and considerably less focused than she had been. Arf was trading worried glances between her mistress, Precia and the woman opposite them, and Vesta had drawn back slightly to the table’s edge.

“That is true,” Precia said smoothly, before the situation could deteriorate any further, “but I’m afraid such a plan would be difficult to the point of impossibility. Attempts have been made along such lines before, and have never met with success unless the Master was making no attempt to hide. The Book is extremely well concealed until the final stages of its activation cycle, and the Wolkenritter will not be so foolish as to leave its host unguarded. If we _can_ locate the Book itself, then we can consider options – alerting the TSAB or, perhaps, a targeted strike to avoid unnecessary death.” Fate relaxed somewhat at this, though she still looked uncomfortable. “Still, it is unlikely we will be able to track it down at all. And if there is no Book, there will be no master to find.”

“I can’t say that I like the idea of getting the Bureau involved,” Benedict put in. “All of us here have plenty of reason to avoid them.”

“Indeed.” Pale lips curled up in a smile. “Well, we shall have to hope it does not come to that. And in the meantime, we can discuss where we will orbit so as to avoid detection while staying within operational range...”

...

Half an hour of discussion later, a decision had been more or less agreed on, and the various occupants of the room began to file out. Fate hung back and waited for Precia, who hadn’t moved from her seat.

“Mother?” she asked, and moved quickly to help the older woman up. She shivered as she felt how light Precia was now, and how heavily she had to lean on Fate. True, she wasn’t supporting the majority of Precia’s weight. But if her condition continued to worsen like it had been in the week or so since Linith had left, it wouldn’t be long before she was. Fate hadn’t realised just how much the familiar did for her mother until they had been separated. Now she looked at the paleness to Precia’s skin, the way her hands trembled minutely and the sense of ephemerality to her body, as if one strong wind could carry her away, and felt like crying.

What made it worse was that she was pretty sure Precia _had_ known how much she needed Linith. And she’d let her – _told_ her – to go with Nanoha and check up on the Takamachi family anyway. Fate had been one of the ones demanding that she do that – partly out of compassion for Nanoha, yes, but had she given any thought to how it would affect her mother? Even for a moment?

She hadn’t, and the guilt from that gnawed at her, even as she crammed it down behind her mask of composure. Settling Precia’s arm almost casually on her shoulder, in a way that concealed how much support it was providing unless you looked quite closely, the two of them manoeuvred out into the corridor and turned in the direction of the Testarossas’ quarters.

They were almost there when a distant shout distracted Fate, coming from somewhere below them. She turned, and deprived of her support, Precia coughed and stumbled. Fate reacted quickly, but the older woman was already falling by the time she moved. Her fingers closed around Precia’s arm, hard – too hard – and jerked her to a halt as Fate shouldered her weight again.

“Mother,” she gasped, horrified. Precia shifted quickly, letting her sleeve fall to hide it, but just a glimpse was enough to see that she was already starting to bruise. An ugly purple band was forming where Fate had grabbed her – hard, yes, but not so hard that it should have had that kind of effect. She was like a china doll these days, Fate thought helplessly, so easily damaged. Fate was meant to be protecting her from harm. Instead, _she_ was the one hurting her. She raised anguished eyes to Precia’s for a moment, then squeezed them tightly shut. No. No, she was meant to be composed, controlled. Something stable for Alicia, after... after. And that meant that if she kept falling apart all the time, she was useless, and then what was the point to her?

“I... I’m sorry, mother,” she stammered, helping Precia into her room. “I didn’t... your arm, I was trying to...” She couldn’t heal it, either, not like Linith could. She had been doing her best in the evenings, progressing through the regime of healing spells that the motherly familiar usually handled. She couldn’t do them nearly as well as Linith, though. It was a horrible, helpless feeling, watching her mother’s condition deteriorate without being able to do anything about it.

“It is nothing,” Precia sighed, sitting down heavily on the bed. “Though do try to be more careful, Fate. It might not matter overmuch in my case, but Alicia could be hurt if you manhandle her like that. And speaking of Alicia, I have little doubt that she was at the centre of that cacophony. Please go and attend to her – I need to rest, and I believe the familiars have returned to their own room, rather than wherever Alicia has got to.” She glanced at the time. “In fact, it’s about time for her to go to bed anyway. Fetch her back here, please.”

Fate hesitated for a moment. But only a moment. Habit and obedience won over concern, and she did as she was told, slipping out of the room as Precia settled herself on the bed with a sigh and going in search of the noise. The ship wasn’t large, with only two levels and a dozen rooms. She located the source of the noise at the same time as the armoured woman, and they met at the door to the impromptu workshop that led into the engine room.

From the sounds of it, a scuffle was going on within. A few words were audible through the door and the general incoherent fury they were being shouted with. “Get her... my tools... workbench... _out!_ ”

“Okay, what’s going on here?” Ićeoak slid the door back with a rattle, interrupting the argument brewing behind it. Alicia stood at one of the workbenches in the long, cluttered room, her blue-haired doll beside her. It lay on the table next to a large, blocky device, whose lights were blinking on and off in a regular pattern. Wilhelm and Benedict were between her and the door, the former being held back by the latter and fuming.

The sole visible eye behind the half-faceplate flickered over the tableau. “Ah. Fine. Wil, stop shouting. Bene, calm your boyfriend down. You, little girl, come on out of there before Wil blows his top.”

The little girl pouted, picking up her doll and hugging it. “Aww! But I was having fun!” She turned to Wilhem. “Did you know the connection-thingie in that thing is wonky, by the way? I fixed it for you, it’s lighting up like it’s meant to now.”

Wilhelm twitched. “It’s not a _thing_ , it’s a... wait, what do you even mean, you fixed it? It’s been broken as long as I’ve been working on it! You probably don’t even know what it does!”

Alicia scowled at this. “I do so! And I asked it to fix itself and it did! Well, actually, the first thing I did was take the red thingie apart like it said in the book which I read ahead in when Mama wasn’t looking. But then it turned out to be different, and the device thingie in it actually was the one from near the end! And there was a lot of stuff I didn’t really understand in there, but there was one thing that looked all wrong, so I checked it and it was! Did you mean to put a different circuit thingie in the shell? It had a different number to the thingie that was meant to be there, so I put the right bit in and the pretty lights came on! Woosh! Oh, and also you were storing stuff in your tools that wasn’t meant to be there! And that was getting gunk in them, so I took the little brush and cleaned them all out!”

Silence followed this explanation. Benedict quirked an eyebrow.

“Girl seems to know what she’s talking about,” he joked. “Maybe we should hire her, instea- hey!”

He was interrupted as Ićeoak shouldered the men out of the way, and curtly pulled the girl from the room. “Keep your workshop better locked in future,” she called over her shoulder as the door swung shut, ignoring the cut-off objection from within. Then she turned her attention to Alicia, who had taken the opportunity to happily bounce over to Fate and grab her hand.

“And _you_ , little girl...”

But Alicia cut her off in mid-sentence, looking up at her curiously. “You’re funny,” she commented. “And like me. Are you a boy or a girl?”

Ićeoak blinked.

“I think you’re probably a girl,” Alicia continued thoughtfully. “But you don’t sound like one, and Dollie,” she held up the little doll to her ear, moving it slightly as if it were whispering to her, “... Dollie thinks you’re neither, which sounds a bit weird to me.” She said this last in a doubtful tone, with a reproachful glance at the doll. Then she looked back up brightly. “Oh! And you’re part Lost Logia too, aren’t you? Like I am!”

The armoured woman went very still for a moment, eye fixed on Alicia intently, who smiled cheerfully back up. Fate could sense rapid calculation going on behind the impassive expression, and subtly shifted Alicia a little behind her, ready for what might be a violent reaction.

But no explosion came. After a moment, Ićeoak shrugged, a wry smile twisting the half of her mouth that was visible. “Pretty much,” she agreed. “You ever heard of Polyam-Ladradun Syndrome?” Two blank looks answered her. “No? It’s nasty stuff. An old Dawn States techno-bioweapon, I think. Takes human beings and reshapes them into weapons. I got infected by an outbreak two years ago. Converted about half of me before it burnt out. Too old, too broken to do the job properly. Don’t worry, I’m not infectious,” she hastened to add. “Now... male hormones, female hormones; both would get in the way of the synthetic stuff the converted bits’re pumping around me. And with rejection issues on top of that, this suit’s all that keeps me alive.” She rapped the faintly humming chest plate with her knuckles and her grin twisted somewhat. “Word of advice; when they tell you not to touch the thing which looks like a Device, don’t.”

“That’s horrible,” said Fate softly, sympathy welling up in her. Ićeoak shrugged dismissively.

“It’s happened. No use complaining about it. With as much of me as it’s replaced, trying to undo it now would kill me.” The bitterness in the words was old and worn, accepted but still burning. “Why do you think I’m here? You think anyone else will have me, like this?” She gestured at the brassy exoskeleton, with its sealed sections and life support systems. “Fat chance. Even with the syndrome burnt out, I’m a TSAB ‘hazard’. They’d want me somewhere they could keep an eye on me. At best.”

“That sounds really sad!” Alicia put in. Taking both of them by surprise, she stepped forward and hugged the older woman, adjusting her position awkwardly to avoid discomfort from the suit’s hard surfaces. “If I think of a way to make you feel better, I will! Maybe I could make your suit work better!” She yawned, then blinked, and looked at Fate. “Oh. But I think I have to go to bed now, because I’m sleepy, and mama always makes me go to bed when I get sleepy. Which I don’t think is very fair, but I have to do it. Come on, big-little sis! Dollie won’t go to bed unless you help tuck her in!”

With an apologetic glance at Ićeoak, Fate followed her back to the two passenger rooms their family were sharing.

Her mind, though, lingered on the woman’s words. On the repercussions of what Lost Logia could do to flesh and blood.

And on what that might mean for Alicia.

...

Chrono found his mother in her quarters on the Asura, slumped over her desk next to a mound of empty cups of tea. In acknowledgement of the fact that she was also his superior, he snuck back out, and knocked loudly. And then knocked again, after a while.

Twenty seconds later, she answered the door. Chrono repressed any smile he may or may not have been inclined to give, and saluted sharply.

“How are you so awake?” Lindy asked, shaking her head sadly. 

“I’m mostly in synch with Pihroea time,” he said, with a shrug. “I’ve been out in natural light for days, and that helps.” He paused. “I’ve come with the summary of the decoded reports from the sunk-cache. You requested them as soon as it was done.”

Lindy rubbed her eyes. “I’m sorry, I just dozed off because I was up most of last ship-night reading the reports from this bit of the sector, trying to see if there was anything else odd,” she apologised. “Can you give me... five minutes or so?”

“I’ll see if Meeting Room 1 is free,” Chrono said. He looked his mother up and down. “And get the kitchens to bring some refreshments. You look half-dead.”

“You could have said I never looked better,” Lindy grumbled, heading in the direction of the small sink in her quarters.

“Yes ma’am,” Chrono said, saluting smartly again.

It was a considerably fresher-looking Flotilla Admiral who entered the meeting room to receive the summary from the Enforcer. Chrono stood, grim-faced, in front of a timeline floating in mid-air.

“From what we have gathered from the sunk-cache, at ten-oh-three DST – the middle of the night, local time – there was a power fluctuation in the aerial coverage, for a period of thirty seven seconds. We can confirm that the Ravi was landed there, at the time. An operator alarm was raised, and was responded to. An inspection was ordered by the on-site maintenance manager, as per protocol; there is no record logging its successful completion.

“At ten-oh-eleven, the last operator-directed action in the control centre is recorded; the operator logs their ten o’clock all clear.” Chrono sniffed. “Late, I should add. No further manual operator activity is raised. An automated warning is raised at ten twenty-three, and is not responded to; we must conclude that the control centre was taken out at some point in those twelve minutes.”

Lindy sighed. “Not even anything from the kill-switch?” she asked. “What was the warning?”

“No, ma’am,” Chrono said. “When we investigated the control centre, we found the dead man’s handle had been bent by the application of a blunt object, such that it was locked in the ‘safe’ position. As for the warning... it’s a fire in the barracks. The one we discovered burned out. No operator action is logged, as I noted before, but the system none-the-less sends the ‘fire contained’ message within one second. There are several such reports recorded, matching up with the locations of the other major fires we found, and each time they are locked down. From this, we must accept that the hostiles had majority control of the base’s systems by that point, but were not operating from the main control console.”

Lindy pursed her lips. This was very, very alarming news indeed. “Was the operator still logged in?” she asked, on a whim.

Chrono nodded. “Yes. I didn’t understand that, either; the hostiles chose to directly control the systems rather than use the user interface. It didn’t make any sense. The subversion shows an intimate understanding of the hardware, but... why would you not use the software if you could? I suspect that they had bypassed the control centre entirely, which would explain the way that the data received by the cache falls in quality and quantity rapidly.”

The admiral nodded. “Ah. That sounds like... well, I’ve encountered records of some things that can do that. Certain specialised forms of subversion support Devices, some summoner lineages... actually, I believe that annoying woman, Alpine, is one of those families with her bugs. You need something dedicated for the role, but it is possible if you have direct access to the hardware.”

The enforcer sighed. “Well, at least that narrows down the range of potential culprits somewhat,” he observed. “Of course, if we’re going to be talking about groups known to have dedicated support Devices and expertise with Bureau data systems...” he added, meaningfully.

“Chrono.” Lindy sighed. “Continue with your report.”

The boy almost went to shrug, but stopped himself. “There’s not much more we can say. The last message sent to the cache was at eleven-eleven DST. The entire site was subjected to a magical wash, so we’re probably not going to get any characteristic markers from mana decay patterns, and there’s microscopic burnt residue consistent with an organic scrub.”

“That tells us that they...”

“... are professionals and very aware of the mechanisms we use to track things,” Chrono agreed. A note which could almost be described as ‘pleading’ entered his voice. “Professional, organised, powerful, and we know that core draining has been taking place on Pihroea and that the base had been alerted of it shortly before the attack! What else could destroy a base so quickly and so silently, and all but cover up the attack?”

“I will not work on the assumption that the Book of Darkness has shown up in my district,” Lindy said sharply. “Not when there are other things which it could be.”

“Six months after the Jewel Seed Incident? When we know it needs vast amounts of magic?” Chrono took a deep breath. “It’s been eleven years,” he said, trying to keep his voice controlled. “It was always going to show up again. It always does. And all it would take is for its current master to hear about the Jewel Seeds and think we might have missed one and...”

“Chrono! Enough,” Lindy said, raising her voice. Under the desk, her fingers were locked together, knuckles white. “It is something I am taking account of, but it is too early to know. And... though I would be loath to do it, I will have you reassigned if I can’t trust you to be objective... well, as objective as possible. I don’t want to do it; it would leave me without the best mage I have access to and if you’re right I’ll need that, but I will!”

The enforcer screwed his eyes shut, biting back anything he was about to say. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. 

“Rest assured, I am treating this with all seriousness,” his mother said. “I have told Gil, and he’s promised me all the help he can get me; I’ve also logged everything I have so far with Central. This is a serious incident; a missing ship and its crew, a destroyed base, and the base staff are missing too?” She breathed out. “The priority is finding the ship. That’s key. We’re working under the assumption that the crew of the Ravi and the base staff are hostages. It’s a transport ship; there’s plenty of space to hold that number of people, and supplies too.

The woman massaged her temples. “However,” she said, “privately... well, although I haven’t seen enough to believe it’s the Book, I do agree that it’s likely related to the Jewel Seed Incident. Maybe whoever did this thinks we missed a Jewel Seed; maybe they think they’ve found an Alhazredian ruin like the Garden of Time... which is another reason they might want a supply ship. In case it’s the former, I think we should be ready. Which is why... you remember Zest’s team?”

Chrono’s eyes widened. “You’ve called them in?” he asked. “The weather got worse, so we have a ward to stop the rain from disrupting the evidence scene and...”

“Well, no,” Lindy admitted. “I don’t have the authority; far outside my jurisdiction. But I have notified them of the missing-ship details – after all, they’re a specialist investigation team, and given the evidence you have here, I’m going to try to request aid from their superiors. The best I can manage is trying to get them in the area, in case your suspicions are right... and if they’re not, at least we’ll have the two of them trying to find our men. And luckily Alpine should still be on maternity leave,” she added, forcing a smile.

“That’s something,” Chrono said, nodding. “I would feel much better knowing they were in the area.”

“And... well, at the very least, as per standard protocol I was authorised to call in a team with experience on UA97, as it’s an Unadministered World. They’ll certainly be useful in setting up an on-site base of operations in case the unknown hostiles are looking for the Jewel Seeds, even if only the squad leader is really suitable for frontline combat. Better that we’re ready and waiting for them if they do show up.”

Chrono blinked. “We have a team of experts on UA97 culture with actual field experience there? Where were they during the Jewel Seed Incident?”

Lindy gave him a look.

The boy blinked. And his face fell. “Wait,” he said. “You didn’t say ‘experts’. When you say ‘a team with experience on UA97’...”

...

It was still early morning in the Lanster household when the hungover young woman in the spare bedroom woke up. Air Cadet training installed early rising as a habit, one that was hard to break even when it wasn’t strictly necessary. Muttering various oaths to herself and searching vaguely around for her shoes, she blearily went through the memories of the previous evening.

It had been a celebratory date with her sort-of-not-quite-official-yet-boyfriend, since they were both on short-term leave after officer training exams. They’d had dinner at a very nice restaurant, and afterwards decided to go flying briefly in one of the larger parks. They’d... somehow gone from skimming treetops to making out, and then made their way back into the city in search of a pub...

She winced as a beam of sunlight through the cracked-open curtain added a mild spike of pain to her headache, and then winced again as her stomach growled. Right, yeah, they hadn’t eaten _that_ much in the restaurant, and they’d done quite a bit of exercise flying afterwards. Plus the... uh... other exercise they’d got.

Food, then, was the name of the game. Tiida was... well, she wasn’t entirely sure where he was, though she’d been over at the house before, and was reasonably sure this was the spare room two doors down from his. She vaguely recalled helping each other up the stairs, and being pointed to a door as he stumbled off down the corridor as quietly as he could. Regardless, at the moment she was more interested in some form of food that wouldn’t upset her stomach than she was in his whereabouts.

Operating on the fairly sound logic that she would mostly likely find such in the kitchen, she limped downstairs, searching her pockets grumpily. After a few seconds of groping, she came up with a small can, which she cracked open and downed the contents of with a grimace.

Ahhh. That was much better.

Granted, her mouth still tasted like something had been roosting in it, but the pounding headache began to subside, and the queasy nausea retreated somewhat. She could think clearly again about things.

Things like last night. She and Tiida had been dancing around each other in a sort-of-but-not-quite-officially-dating way for a month or so now, and this might be enough to solidify that into a definite relationship. He’d certainly been a lot more interesting since he’d got back from whatever had happened on the training mission he’d been on; more mature and confident in himself. There were rumours he’d seen some real action, too, though of course he refused to talk about it. The list of recommendations from high-ranking members of the navy in his file – and the classification on why they were there and what he had done to impress two fleet Admirals and an Investigation team leader – certainly seemed to bear out that whatever had happened, it had probably been impressive.

So absorbed was she in her thoughts that she almost missed the fact that the kitchen was occupied as she pushed the door open. It was only a flash of bright orange movement in the corner of her eye that drew her attention to the little girl standing on tiptoe to more easily reach the countertop as she poured some sort of brightly coloured cereal into a bowl. She was dressed in what looked like a school uniform, with her hair tied into neat beribboned pigtails, and was humming to herself cheerfully. At the sound of the door opening, she spun around, still holding the box.

A short pause followed as young woman and young child took each other in. The little girl broke it.

“I know _you_ ,” she accused. “You’re the girl Tiida was with last night. Ke... Keva...”

“Just Kevvy will do. And you’re his little sister, right? Teana.”

“Uh huh,” agreed Tea, nodding agreeably. Then she stopped, and glared. “But you’re not allowed my cereal!” She hugged the box protectively. “It’s mine! The last girl who came around here with Tiida took some of mine, and I’m only allowed a new box every three weeks, so I had to eat Tiida’s boring yucky cereal for _three whole days_. So you’re not allowed to steal this one! It’s mine, see!”

And indeed, the front of the box had been scribbled over with the words ‘Belongs to Tea, dont touch’ in big capital letters. Kevvy, however, was more interested in the other thing Tea had said. “Last girl? When was that?” Tiida had never mentioned a girlfriend. Then again, it could just be a study partner or something.

“Months ago,” said Tea, scowling. Evidently, she still hadn’t forgiven the trespass. “She had green hair and she came around with Miss Rizu when I had to go stay with their mummy, and she was really cool at first, but then she took my cereal! But Miss Rizu told her off for it and said that it was mine and she shouldn’t have done that without me even having to say so! I like Miss Rizu, she’s nice. Tiida likes her too. Oh, and you’re not allowed my milk either! It’s the one with the purple top, and it’s just right for me, and if you take it I’ll be really mad! It’s _blackcurrant_!”

Kevvy was just beginning to parse this when the kitchen door opened again, and a rumple-haired, Tiida entered the room, rubbing his eyes tiredly. His shirt was noticeably absent, and Kevvy’s eyes made a quick circuit of his bare chest with definite interest. Yum.

When her eyes drifted up to his expression, though, her good mood vanished. The young lieutenant’s face was grim, and he looked even more exhausted than most of a night’s missed sleep should have made him. It was a combination that usually followed bad news, in her experience. He nodded to her in greeting, and started to say something that was interrupted before he got the first word out.

“ _Tiida!_ ”

Both adults winced at the volume and pitch of Tea’s indignant shout. She finished stowing her cereal in one of the lower cupboards and rounded on him, stomping her foot angrily. “I told you you’re meant to wear clothes around the house, you look all yucky and half-dressed and weird-haired!” She sighed dramatically. “Honestly, do I have to look after you all by myself? And another thing! You came back _late_ last night! Do you know what time it was when you came in the door? Do you? It wasn’t even night-time anymore! It was so late it was early again! You woke me up!”

Tiida pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Tea...” A vague motion with his other hand summoned a Jacket and he walked over to the sink to pour himself a glass of water, which he drained with evident relief.

Then he turned back to his little sister and knelt down in front of her, taking her hands. She finally seemed to catch onto his mood, and fell silent.

“I’m sorry, Tea,” he started, and the nervous weight in Kevvy’s gut intensified. That was never a good start to a serious talk.

Tea blinked up at him for a moment, as a cast of... something, slid across her face. It seemed to mingle comprehension, a strange sort of maturity and resignation. She nodded slowly, the corners of her mouth turning down as her shoulders fell.

“You have to go away again, don’t you?” she asked sadly. Tiida winced and opened his mouth to reply, but she carried on over him. “And it’s going to be for a while, because you always get sad and sorry when you have to go away for more than a week.” She spoke with no anger or resentment, just a sad kind of understanding, as if it were merely a fact of life to her that sometimes her brother left her alone; one she’d long ago accepted.

Tiida sighed, and bowed his head in assent. “Yes, I’m afraid so. And... and they said they had no idea how long it was going to be this time, and I just can’t move you again. Not when it might only be for a few weeks.” 

“I’m going to have to stay in the care place again?” Tea asked, looking down. She forced herself to smile. “Well, at... at least I’ll get to stay at the same school with my friends. That’s... that’s a good thing. And since you’re the big hero, that... that means it’s important, right?”

He sighed, rubbing his eyes. “A situation’s come up on Pihroea, one that’s probably connected to... to UA-97. They’re calling in everyone who has experience there.” He shot a warning glance at Kevvy, cutting off the questions she was brimming to ask with a wordless _’later.’_

“J... just promise me you’ll be okay?” Tea asked, vulnerability creeping into her voice. “You... you have to pr-promise me really, really hard you won’t get hurt like... like last time. You have to!”

Tiida engulfed her in a hug. “I promise,” he swore, drawing back, “that I will be as careful as I can be, and that I will absolutely come back. In time for your birthday, even. I’ll bring Rizu and Mei around and you can play with them again, does that sound good?” Tea nodded slowly, though she still looked frightened. Her birthday wouldn’t be for another four and a half months, though, so it was a promise he was almost certain he could keep.

“And Rizu will be there as well, and she’s a healer, remember?” he prompted, hoping to get her mind off the thought of him being injured. “She already healed me the first time, and I bet she’s got better since then. So I’ll be perfectly safe, and you don’t have to worry. Okay?”

She nodded again tremulously, and then hugged him, wrapping her arms round his chest and squeezing as hard as she could, eyes tight shut and buried in his shoulder. “You’d better,” she muttered quietly. “I don’t wanna lose my big brother too.”

He held her a moment longer, before she squirmed out of his grip, dried her eyes off on her sleeve, and picked up her discarded and forgotten bowl of cereal. “I have to get to school soon,” she said, trying to control her voice and doing – in Tiida’s opinion – a pretty good job of it. “I should have breakfast before it’s too late and I have to go.”

He nodded, and stood aside as she went about retrieving milk and a spoon for herself, moving quietly over to where Kevvy was hovering halfway through the doorframe, embarrassed and attempting to give them some privacy. _’I can’t tell you any details,’_ he pre-empted her _’I don’t know many myself, other than the location and the reason I’m being called in.’_

Pursing her lips, she nodded, and glancing over at him. He wasn’t looking at her, focused instead on Tea. _’She’s usually a handful, but she can be so responsible at times like this... it still startles me occasionally,’_ he admitted ruefully. _’It’s not fair.’_

 _’Not fair that she has to be, or not fair that you’re not around enough to know her better?’_ she asked. She didn’t have any siblings, so she couldn’t really understand how it must feel, but she could certainly sympathise with the guilt he was clearly feeling.

 _’Both,’_ he shrugged, sighing. Then he turned to her, something else rising to the front of his mind. _’Kevvy, about last night...’_

Way ahead of you, she was tempted to say. But he was trying to be kind about it, and she at least owed him politeness, so she just nodded. _’It was fun,’_ she said instead. _’I enjoyed myself. A lot, actually.’_ A faint chuckle broke through, despite herself. _’You know how to show a girl a good time, I’ll give you that.’_

They stood there a moment longer, in awkward silence. Then, she sucked in a breath and took the plunge, knowing what was coming. _’When will you be leaving?’_

 _’Within the next day or two. Probably on a sprinter flight headed towards Suionetheod, or the next sector capital in from it. Then a few hard days of teleporting to get to Pihroea.’_ He sighed. _’Kevvy... I enjoyed last night as well, I really did. But I don’t... I think it should be a one-time thing.’_ He looked over, apologetically. _’With Tea to handle, and this mission coming up now, I just don’t think I can...’_

_’Yeah. I understand.’_

Breakfast in the Lanster household that day was a quiet one, each member absorbed in their thoughts and fears on what was coming.

...

Bored.

Bored bored bored.

Bored bored bored bored _bored_.

There was, Nanoha had discovered, actually very little for a person to do when recovering from a broken hand and injured ribs. Well, no. That wasn’t strictly true. There was plenty to do. It was just that... well, it was all boring.

For instance, she could resort to her usual pastime when she had little better to do; running simulations and reading on Raising Heart. Except she couldn’t, because it was damaged, and Linith had sneakily secreted the Device away somewhere – that wasn’t in her room – while it repaired itself. And trying to run a search spell for it had earned a ten-minute lecture on not overstraining herself. Again. Nanoha privately suspected the reason it had failed was that the little ruby gem was on Linith’s person somewhere, and that’s why she wasn’t concerned about leaving Nanoha to her own devices. Because _she_ had Nanoha’s own Device! Vesta would have been outraged at the sneakiness of it. Well, outraged or impressed.

She shook her head, trying to put aside that thought. She kept expecting Vesta to come in – that was another thing she usually filled her time with. There wasn’t much better for killing a few hours than playing with her familiar. But Vesta wasn’t here either. She was still a week away, and couldn’t even send messages while she was en route. There was no help coming from that quarter.

Other things to do... she could read! Reading was always a possibility. Sadly, all of her _interesting_ reading material was on Raising Heart. What was left around the apartment were books and magazines that were either dry, dull or both dry _and_ dull.

She had read them all anyway. They lasted about a day and a half.

That had left her with even less to do, as well as a headache. Another thorough scouring of the room turned up a slightly battered Go set. Unfortunately, by the time she discovered it, Linith had left on some sort of super-secret cat business, so she had nobody to play with except herself. And that was slightly hindered by the fact that she... uh... wasn’t very good at it.

It should really be illegal for this much boredom to happen to one person, she decided.

She had counted how many tiles there were on the ceilings of each room. Twice. As well as how many pictures and pieces of furniture there were. She’d spent long hours staring out of the windows, wondering if the red knight she’d fought was going after other innocent people out there in the city. She’d picked apart the spells that Linith had placed on her arm – both paralysis and healing, though she didn’t think she could manage either without Raising Heart to help – and she’d started to phone Suzuka or home at least a dozen times each, though Linith’s admonishment to keep her head down had so far prevented her from actually making the calls.

Linith had said that when she got back from whatever it was she was doing, she would let Nanoha go out and meet mama and Suzuka and Arisa again. But she had been away for hours already, and Nanoha didn’t think she’d be back anytime soon. Which meant she still had hours. And hours. And hours. Of being _bored_.

She wasn’t angry about being hurt, or looking for revenge. She wasn’t ‘raring to go and get herself hurt again’, no matter what Linith said. And she wasn’t... _that_ creeped out about the week-long silence, with no sign of their enemy or messages from Precia and the others.

She just... she just wished that something would _happen_.

...

Out on a barren plain, sand roared upwards through fire and fell again as a rain of molten glass. Huge, carapaced coils thrashed and flailed, and a death rattle came from a ridge of blade-like plates that lined the back of the enormous serpentine creature that was locked in combat with a tiny, implacable foe.

A deafening screech echoed out over the landscape.

The beast was awake, injured and angry. These facts were connected. It was not a terribly intelligent creature, despite the size of its brain, and knew only that it had been slumbering, and then had come heat and pain and something that was not-prey not-mate not-rival.

The sand-wyrms of Pihroea were apex predators in the desert that was their natural environment. The concept of ‘predator’ held no meaning to them. But this one was beginning to learn it nonetheless.

It struggled on anyway. Rearing up, its serrated tongue-tendrils lashed out to snare its tiny foe and pull them back into its jaws. A moment later it reared back, screaming, as they were severed near the tips and cauterised by the burning sword the figure wielded.

Signum’s face was impassive as she avoided another enormous clash of the wyrm’s jaws, save for a faint frown. This level of fighting wasn’t difficult – to be honest, it was more a chore than anything. What it _was_ was time consuming. The wyrms weren’t much of a threat to her – they were so huge that they moved comparatively slowly, and telegraphed their motions so far in advance that they might as well have been shouting them out for the world to hear. But the same size that made them slow and cumbersome when not beneath the sand also made them incredibly tough, and it took a while even for her to wear one down to exhaustion.

They also had an annoying habit of trying to get away when first roused, but Zafira was quite adept at stopping that. Generally by punctuating its path through the sand with bright white spikes whenever it tried to dive. It had only taken one or two attempts for it to scream in rage and rise up to attack the two of them full-on, which was just as they wanted it.

Still, despite her seeming stoicism, Signum couldn’t help but feel a little distaste at what she was doing as she ducked and dived around its wild snaps. This was no way to fight, attacking a defenceless animal – well, a dumb animal, at least – in its sleep, then harassing it until it fell. This was not honourable, or worthy of a Cloud Knight’s sword.

It was, however, an efficient way of gathering Linker Cores for Hayate. And that took precedence, no matter what her personal feelings on the matter were. She sighed, avoided another crash of the huge, beak-like jaws, and counted the glowing anchor points Zafira was littering its hide with while it spent its attention on her. Thirteen. Three more would probably suffice, and he would have those in a few more seconds. She ducked lazily under a serrated tongue – every inch of the creature was armoured in rough scales that probably felt like a wood rasp to bare flesh, if not worse – and struck again with Laevatein. The sword broke apart into its chain-linked Schlangeform, extending out to catch the wyrm a vicious cut across the head that left a scorched score-mark down the angled carapace. It roared again and bit at her, but she slipped in easily under it and made for the throat, pulling the sword back into its base form and sheathing it. Mana pulsed as the sheath compressed it, the power shooting up to oppressive levels as she loaded a cartridge.

 _‘Zafira,’_ she ordered.

 _‘Ready,’_ came the reply, and she brought her sword round into the familiar stance as she closed in.

[Fliegender Drachenblitz!]

Flames exploded from the sheath in impossible volume as she drew and swung in a smooth and practiced motion, the attack slamming home into a weakness between plates under the creature’s jaw with the force of a point-blank bombardment spell. The impact was literally bone-shaking, sending the wyrm reeling backwards to crash down upon the sand as Signum kicked upwards to gain height. Its massive body slammed into the desert surface, sending gouts of sand up to be caught by the wind and cloud the air. Zafira was there immediately, wreathing it in chains and tying the anchors on its hide to those he’d placed on the ground. Interlocking spikes formed a collar beneath its head, and though it thrashed and writhed furiously, it couldn’t get free.

It could, however, still resist enough that extracting its Linker Core would be difficult. Her face a mask of dispassion, Signum flipped her sword around, and brought together the hilt and its scabbard.

[Bogenform!] Laevatein announced, and the two halves fused, their centre of mass shifting backward as the Armed Device rotated into its archery configuration.

Conjuring a shaft of fire between her fingers, Signum notched it on the mighty recurve and drew, sighting down the flickering length to the struggling creature below. Zafira, knowing what was coming, had long since vacated the line of fire.

Or rather, the cone of fire. Which was a rather appropriate term, really.

[Fallender Glutregen.]

The arrow left the bow... and fractured, into hundreds of tiny pieces. And then, somehow, it kept on fracturing, every droplet of flame budding, multiplying, generating more and more siblings for itself until the sky beneath her was a conical inferno. And every bolt of fire streaked down, slamming into thick, chitinous armour or loose desert sand, scorching or melting whatever they hit. Unlike all of her jousting with the enormous creature so far, this wasn’t a single attack, or even a flurry of attacks. It was nothing less than a sustained _bombardment_ , hammering it into the ground with flame and magic, every impact another heated brand upon its flesh, another blow to the spine. Sand hissed and fused into glass, desert scrubs caught light and burned merrily, tiny pockets of moisture hissed into steam. It seemed to go on forever.

And then, finally, it was over. The wyrm wasn’t dead – she could see that it was still breathing, albeit slowly and unevenly, the toughness of its hide and its adaptation to the desert meant that fire posed little threat to its life. But it was still and silent, no longer moving. The flames and heat may not have put it down on their own, but the magical bombardment that had accompanied them had definitely knocked the fight out of the groaning leviathan.

All that was left now was to finish the job, and already, Zafira was moving in with the Book’s gathering-simulacra, like a carrion-beast closing in on a corpse. The glowing light of the wyrm’s Linker Core began to leech out of it like lifeblood flowing from a mortal wound...

Signum paused for a moment and shook her head, rejecting that analogy. The unpleasantness of this work was starting to get to her, in a way that it wouldn’t have done a few cycles ago. Hayate’s influence, no doubt. But it was still necessary, no matter how distasteful. Hayate’s health came first. Before anything else.

No matter what.

And with that thought in mind, she swooped down to help her comrade.

Some considerable distance away, a woman with hair a few shades darker than the sand around her lowered a pair of perfectly mundane, non-magical binoculars and edged further down behind the dune she lay on. Indeed, she wasn’t just on it, but partially buried in it, the sand covering most of her body below the neck. With eyes narrowed against the sun’s glare, she surveyed the melted sand, the still-burning bushes and scrub, and the sluggish form of the great wyrm itself. Its residual twitches were dying away as it gave in to exhaustion and trauma and began to slowly retreat deep beneath the sands to recover.

She raised the binoculars again, staring at the pink-haired woman and the white-haired man as they conferred briefly over an object the latter carried. Then they vanished, with a teleport signature so faint that she could barely detect it even when she was looking at it. That drew a scowl. It had been hard enough to find them once, and only possible due to the mana their battle was giving off. Even then, it had been mostly luck that she was looking in roughly the right place at the right time. Tracking them back to their base would be nigh-impossible, if they were this good.

A few more minutes passed. Then, cautiously, Linith emerged from her hiding place and took stock of the battlefield once more. She approached the area the monsters and mages – or perhaps just monsters of different ilks – had been fighting in, with a wary eye for traps. She sniffed the air experimentally, then called up the grainy, expanded image of the object the two had been conferring over and spent some time examining it again in minute detail.

Eventually, she reached a conclusion and spoke, more to herself than the depleted wildlife around her.

“Damn.”

...

A typhoon howled on Pihroea. The storm had rolled in off the ocean, quenching the heat and drowning the dry earth. The dried out rivers ran with water for the first time in months. The wind picked the water off the surface of the saturated ground, carrying mud and grime with it to paint whatever it touched.

Warrant Officer Quint Nakajima sighed, and looked back over the ruined TSAB training facility. Within the safety of the interdiction barrier, the weather was prevented from contaminating the crime scene, but the howl of the wind and the thrumming patter of the rain against the heat haze of the ward was disheartening. 

“Nothing,” she said. “Not a wretched, miserable thing. Zero, zip, nothing, nulla, nope, negative.”

“That was to be expected,” Zest said beside her, huddled up in his cloak. “I didn’t think the people before us would really have missed anything obvious, and it’s been more than a fortnight. But we still had to look. And I have my own thoughts, having seen it from the ground.

The woman slumped down on a folding chair, arms crossed. “What do you have?” she asked, “because... I got nothing of use from this place.”

Zest squatted down, spreading his hands to bring up a hologram of the facility. “Well, for one, having seen it in person I’m now almost certain that the entire attacking force began inside the grounds,” he said. “There was no assault. Which means... I strongly suspect that we are specifically dealing with a small, elite team here who was responsible for it. Possibly stowaways on the Ravi. They can’t have teleported in, because that would have been caught on the cache.” He paused, cocking his head. “Well, unless they back-ended a pre-existing access request,” he corrected himself. “We’d need to check for that.”

“They wiped the main computer banks. Just smashed them to pieces, and then fried them,” Quint said sullenly. “What’s the point? The cache won’t have enough to tell that.”

“It might,” Zest said with a shrug. “Either way, I strongly suspect they went for the Ravi first. Sensible tactic. If you didn’t lock down the ship first, you’d risk it escaping and you’d need to damage it to stop that. Not to mention that cargo ships like that have basic point defence; enough to keep them safe when landed. We’ll have to wait until the forensic reports come back, but I suspect we’ll find out that the Ravi was one of the things shooting at the base. Likewise, from the way that there’s no sign of an engagement beyond the perimeter, I think it’s likely that the attackers had a powerful support mage who could shunt the entire area into a barrier. The thing which doesn’t fit with that is the lack of a record of a barrier, but... hmm, we do know they had control of the sensor systems by that point.”

“There’s just not enough evidence to say anything,” the woman said, slumped down. “We’re out at the back-end of nowhere, the scene was already contaminated by the time we got here, and...”

A junior Ground Forces officer, wrapped up in a warm Jacket, approached the two of them with a hint of nervousness in her manner. “Captain Ladislao is just having a ten minute status update over in the main tent on the hour, before we turn in for the night,” the olive-skinned woman said, her dark eyes gleaming in the light, “and requests that you join him. He welcomes any contributions.”

Zest inclined his head. “We’ll be there,” he said, glancing at Quint and her scowl. He waited until the younger woman had left before stepping to stand in front of Quint, hands on hips. “Quint,” he said, warningly.

“Yes?” she replied, not meeting his eyes.

“Quint,” the man said, dropping his voice. “Are you going to be able to keep your mind on the mission?”

“I’m fine,” she said, grimacing, eyes drifting over to the storm outside. “It’s just I’m exhausted from the teleporting here, and... and I’ll be better when I get a proper rest.”

“Don’t lie to my face,” Zest said. He sighed, and leant back against the wall. “You’re not fine, and if you were fine, there would be something wrong with you. I know how much it meant to you, and I know you didn’t want to end up all the way over here when you bl... when it’s linked to bad memories.” He paused. The man was not entirely at home with situations like this. It was not a problem which could be solved with appropriate amounts of violence. “Do you want to... say anything?” he asked, uneasily.

Quint looked at him, her lips in a thin line. “I’ll be fine,” she insisted, her expression putting a lie to her words. “Really. I... it’s not like I have any other children who can be kidnapped, that they can... can just vanish with nothing on the security and no one seeing anything odd and... and zero evidence of who did it. It’s like they melted into the walls, the way they could vanish on a perfectly normal trip to the hospital. And it happens just when I’m away, like... like whatever was responsible was just waiting for me to be out of the picture, off in this wretched dead-end district, so it’s my fault for not being able to protect those little girls, that I couldn’t be their mother, show them that they were more than just experiments and... and...”

The man awkwardly wrapped his arms around her, and let her choke out words into his Jacket. 

“I’m not crying,” Quint managed, after a while. “It’s just the rain. The rain which... which is getting through the wards.” She frowned, some trace of a professional demeanour returning along with a frown.

“We’ll have to point out at the meeting that the barrier is leaking,” Zest said, neutrally. “Or rather, I will. You should go; get some rest. You’re clearly just exhausted from the travel, nothing more. As you said, it’s not like we have much evidence. Tomorrow we can go interview the groups which have suffered the linker core draining attacks, all right?”

She nodded tiredly, and turned to trudge off. Zest frowned as he watched her go, and shook his head with a muttered curse.

Outside the barrier, the rain hammered down, raging on into the night. Monsoon season was well and truly started.

The real brunt of the storm, though, had yet to strike.

...


	5. Chapter Four

“Mistress!”

Twenty kilograms of distraught, tearful, six-year old catgirl hit Nanoha full in the chest, sending her back onto her pillows with an “oof!” as Vesta began frantically patting her down for any injuries other than the obvious cast on her arm and babbling at her so fast that Nanoha could barely understand her.

“Mistress mistress mistress! I was really worried it’s been ages since I’ve seen you and look you got a broken arm because I wasn’t with you and I _said_ this was a bad idea and look I was right and I told you so and I was lonely without you and we’ve never been apart that long and I never want to be again because look you got hurt without me and...”

“Vesta... Vesta! Hush!” Fending off the assault, Nanoha finally managed to cradle Vesta’s face with her functional hand and put a thumb over her lips. “I’m happy to see you too. And I’m sorry I got hurt.” She smiled sheepishly. “I guess I should have brought you with me after all, huh?”

Vesta didn’t smile along with the joke, though. She just looked up at Nanoha through big, tear-stained eyes, her lips trembling. “I was really scared,” she admitted, her voice catching, and Nanoha winced. Gathering the smaller girl to her, she awkwardly turned her around so that she had her back to Nanoha and then put both arms around her, hugging her tight. It wasn’t the most comfortable position, with her right forearm still in a rigid magical cast. But Vesta’s trembling slowed down nonetheless, and she huddled her face into the crook of Nanoha’s neck, muttering something completely inaudible but apparently heartfelt.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Nanoha whispered, stroking her hair. It was easy to forget sometimes that Vesta wasn’t even a year old, chronologically. Normally she acted like a sister to Nanoha – how much younger, she couldn’t say, but not too much. Alicia had certainly adopted her as an older sister figure, and Vesta looked after her with complete seriousness and surprising responsibility, for all that they played around. But underneath that, she was still very young and not very experienced, and had never been apart from Nanoha for more than a day. No wonder she had taken the long separation badly.

Nanoha blinked, as she realised she was drifting off again – daydreams and idle thoughts had been a necessity just to survive almost a solid fortnight of crushing boredom, but now probably wasn’t the time. Absently fiddling with Vesta’s silken scarf, she looked up at the door to her room and greeted her other, more restrained visitors with a smile.

“Arf, Fate. Um... hi.”

The other familiar snorted. “’Hi’? That’s all you have to say for yourself?” She motioned to Nanoha’s arm, scowling in a way that was only half-playful. “What’s this meant to be?! Don’t just ‘hi’ us, explain yourself!”

“Uh...”

Fate saved her from having to justify her actions by walking over and perching on the side of the bed. “Alicia will be through once she’s done hugging Linith,” she explained quietly. “And I think Mother wanted to talk to her after that, so she’ll be a little while. Are you alright?”

“I’m... okay, I guess,” Nanoha replied after a moment’s thought. Without thinking, she rubbed her cast. “My arm is nearly better, and I got to see my family before Linith shut me in here and told me to rest. And mama got the Device back from Arisa – it’s still broken, but it works for comms – so we’ve been talking every so often.” Fate smiled, happy for her, and reached over to squeeze her hand lightly.

“They’re doing well?”

Nanoha hesitated slightly at that, because being hospitalised couldn’t really be called ‘well’, and Arisa still wasn’t out of hospital. “They’re... not any worse,” she temporised. “Mama is feeling a lot better, and she sent me a new phone – just the same as my old one, too! – so that I could talk to Suzuka and Arisa a couple of times. Arisa, uh. Shouted at me. A lot.” She grinned sheepishly. “I guess I need practice on my brilliant rescues?”

Fate patted her hand. “A bit more practice would be good, yes,” she agreed. “Especially if it stops you from breaking anything else.” She gave Nanoha a tiny smile. “We were all very worried on the way here. It’s good to see you’re alright.”

Nanoha looked down, and tried not to squirm with guilt.

Arf had shifted forms and approached the bed as they spoke. Settling herself by the side of the bed and allowing Fate to shift her feet up onto her back, she sniffed at Nanoha’s arm, muzzle wrinkling slightly as she gave the canine equivalent of a frown. _‘Well, it smells alright.’_ she remarked. _‘When will the cast come off?’_

“Ah... Linith said that if my check-up shows it’s healed properly, I can take it off tomorrow.”

“Good!” a new voice interrupted. “Because once you’re better, we need to find the meanie-heads who did it and tell them off!”

Alicia stamped into the room, blonde hair flowing after her in a state of disarray that clearly hadn’t seen a comb recently. She pointed an accusing finger at Nanoha. “You’re not allowed to get hurt anymore!” she mandated. “So don’t! Or I’ll tell you off! And then I’ll... I’ll get _Linith_ to tell you off even worse! Understand?”

Nanoha raised a finger to point out that Linith had, in fact, already told her off exhaustively and at length, before shutting her in a dreary little room for almost a fortnight without anything to do except be soul-crushingly bored, but Alicia continued talking over her before she could even get a word out.

“And Vesta was really worried about you as well! Really _really_ worried! She cried at night! I had to cuddle her to sleep!”

“D-did not!” objected Vesta, from just below Nanoha’s chin. Her ears quivered, tickling her mistress’ nose. The denial was somewhat spoiled by the sniff that followed it, though. “And... and you were b-being just as worried!” she added defensively, apparently aware of this lapse.

“Was not!” Alicia shot back. “I was comforting you!”

“Were so!”

“Was not!”

“Were- Linith!”

“Huh?” Alicia blinked. “What about Linith?” She shook her head without giving Vesta a chance to answer, and returned to her original topic. “And I was not! You were the one being all sad and kitten-y!” She paused and tilted her head, her expression one of serious thought. “Though I guess kittens aren’t always sad,” she added. “I mean, I don’t see why they would be. I wouldn’t be sad, if I was a kitten. Having a tail and ears would be really cool. I could waggle them and hear stuff really well! And turn invisible!”

A maternal hand ruffled her hair from behind, making her jump. “And look adorable, I have no doubt,” Linith smiled, and rolled her eyes indulgently at Alicia’s squawk of protest. “But debates about what species you are will have to wait for now. I’ve told Precia everything we’ve gathered so far. And we have the beginnings of a plan.”

...

It took about half an hour for all of the possibilities, probabilities and potentials to be explored.

“Okay, so we’re basically pretty sure it’s the Book of Darkness,” Arf eventually summed up, once the various theories and counter-arguments began to repeat themselves. “So we’ll assume that for now. That means the Wolkenritter, and _that_ means we need to try and catch one alone if we want to have any chance of winning.”

She sat hunched forward at the small table, staring at the sketchy map of the local region of Dimensional Space that hovered over it, courtesy of Linith. Fate fidgeted next to her familiar, leaning into her and resting her head on Arf’s shoulder. Nanoha, by constrast, was sitting awkwardly with a still-cast arm and had Vesta occupying her lap. Alicia had been allowed to attend, on the basis that the hotel suite only had two rooms and the door wasn’t thin enough to stop her eavesdropping, but had been consigned to the sofa with a puzzle to try and occupy her attention. It wasn’t working.

“We know they hunt,” offered Nanoha, raising her broken arm as evidence. “And they do it alone, if the one I met was any judge. We could catch them while they’re doing that.”

“How?” Arf scratched her head. “That’s the thing, they probably hunt all over the world. All over multiple worlds. How do we pin them down?” She stared off into space for a moment, thinking hard. “Well... there are three ways to hunt. You either go to where you know your prey will be and ambush them, or you lay out bait and wait for them to come get it, or,” she smirked, “you find somewhere they’ve been and track them from there to wherever they are now.”

“The latter, I am afraid, will not be feasible,” Precia pointed out, deflating Arf’s smirk abruptly. “The Wolkenritter are far too apt at concealing their presence for tracking them to be a simple matter. Linith has already attempted to trail them back to their home base. If she has had no success in two weeks, I very much doubt it will be possible for us to do at all.”

Nanoha glanced across at Linith, surprised. “So that’s where you were going when you left me on my own!” she accused. “And after you told me it was too dangerous to! You... that’s not fair! You can’t do that! That’s like the thingie where you say not to do something and then do it anyway!”

“I think you mean ‘hypocrisy’, dear,” Linith corrected her. “And it was not, because I kept my distance, took full precautions to avoid notice, did not try to follow them until they had left, and had absolutely no intention of doing anything other than passively observing. You, I am sure, had rather different goals in mind, did you not?”

Nanoha suddenly became very interested in the spikey mess of Vesta’s hair, and set herself to busily attempting to comb it down. If anyone heard a faint mumble of “still hypocrisy,” as she attacked the grey-black tangle, they had enough tact not to comment on it.

“I like the waiting and pouncing option,” Vesta offered into the brief silence. “We just figure out where there’s lots of magic for them, then wait there, and then graargh! Pounce, and get them! Right?”

Linith shook her head. “Wrong, I’m afraid,” she said. Vesta’s ears wilted, flattening back against her skull. “I’m sorry, sweetie, but there’s just too much space to cover. We could wait by the same spot for weeks without any guarantee they would go there. By the same token, there’s no certainty they’d detect any bait we laid, unless it was powerful enough that it would probably catch the attention of the TSAB as well.”

Fate tilted her head and raised a hand tentatively. “We could do both,” she suggested. “Find somewhere they’re likely to frequent, and lay bait there. Something like magical flares, as if someone was practicing. And... that means they’re less likely to be suspicious, because... it’ll be somewhere they’ve found magic before?” She tailed off at the end, almost more questioning than qualifying, and looked nervously at Precia for approval. 

The older woman was resting her chin on a pale, thin hand, her lips pursed. Slowly, she nodded. “It... has potential,” she said slowly. “Though still a relatively low chance of success. However, a combination of activity analysis and bait should grant better odds on a successful encounter.” She drummed her fingers on the table, mind racing. “We should also consider the fact that _they_ are likely looking for us, or at least for Nanoha and Linith. Opposition, this far out in the backwaters, will not be something they are used to in this incarnation. Successful opposition much less so.”

“I wasn’t...” began Nanoha, but Precia cut her off with a sharp wave of her free hand.

“You fought one of the Cloud Knights in a confined area, damaged it and escaped alive and undrained,” she interrupted flatly. “You were successful, far more so than most mages they fight. Additionally, you revealed that you have a connection with the girl they attacked.” She held up her hand again in a calming gesture as Nanoha’s eyes went wide and she shot to her feet. Vesta squawked as she fell off her comfortable lap-seat. “Calm, be _calm_ , Nanoha. They have drained her already, and she is no threat to them. They will have no further interest in her for her own sake, they are efficient beyond all else. But they may well realise, that she is a potential vector they can use to find you.” She pursed her lips again. “We may be able to use that against them. Hmm. It certainly couldn’t hurt to spread some false information.”

“I’m not sure I like the idea of lying to Arisa...” said Nanoha dubiously as she sat back down and allowed Vesta to grumpily reclaim her seat. “Or using her at all like this, really. It feels like... I don’t know, like not playing fair.” She frowned. “I don’t like lying to people. And I don’t like using people, either. We should be better than that.”

Glances were exchanged around the table. Fate squeezed Nanoha’s hand and opened her mouth to say something, but Vesta beat her to it.

“Oh no you don’t, mistress!” Extracting herself from Nanoha’s arms, the apparent six-year old clambered around until she was sitting on the table facing Nanoha, right in front of her. She scowled theatrically, hands on her hips. “This is sneaky stuff, and that’s what I’m here for! I’m really good at sneaky stuff, and you’re not, so I have to do sneaky-thinking for you! That’s what a familiar is for! And as your familiar, I’m saying this is a _good plan!_ It’s like when I growl and wiggle my tail at the squeaky toy so it thinks I’m going to pounce straight at it, but then ha! I jump round to the side and pounce on it from there, and it can’t get away from me, because I’m not where it thinks I’ll be! This is basic sneakiness... ness! So you have to listen to people who know it better than you do, like me!”

There was a brief, rather confused pause as Nanoha digested this, broken only by Arf’s quiet grumble of “I don’t think your squeaky toys are S-ranked Belkan knights, Vesta,” which earned her a glare and a stuck-out tongue from the catgirl. But eventually, Nanoha nodded slowly, and sighed.

“I guess,” she admitted. “As long as you promise Arisa won’t get hurt or anything.” She looked to Linith as she said this, and was rewarded with a confident smile.

“We don’t even know for sure that they’ll be listening in on her,” Linith pointed out. “They drain a lot of people, after all, and they drove us both off with relative ease. They may not have bothered tagging her, though I’d like you to try and remember what you told her in the conversations you have had since then.” She paused, considering. “Well, if they’d traced us back here, we’d have been attacked already, so I suppose they haven’t done that much, at least. Anyway, if they have bugged her, all they’ll be doing is listening. And that means all you need to do is drop the right idle comment.”

She leaned forward, spinning the hovering map of the region on its axis and looking over it. “So. First, we need to work out where we’re going to lay our little trap. And then we need to decide exactly what we want them to overhear, and what we’re going to use as bait in case they don’t.”

Quietly, Fate reached out and tapped the hologram, zooming in on a smaller patch of the region, closer to TSAB-controlled space than Earth. A slight smile hovered around her lips, and she raised a finger to draw attention.

“I think,” she said carefully, “I have an idea about that.”

...

Hayate knocked softly on the door, waited for the “c’min”, and pushed it open. She wheeled in, Shamal drifting a step and a half behind her, and gave Chikaze a smile. The cancer patient was propped up in bed on a pile of pillows that was, Hayate was fairly sure, rather larger than what she was meant to be allocated. She was a little pale and had bags under her eyes, but other than that she looked well enough.

“How’d it go?” she asked in a raspy voice. “Results good?”

“Uuuuurgh,” groaned Hayate, exasperation heavy in her voice. “Don’t talk to me about the check-up, please. I just spent half an hour getting poked and prodded _everywhere_. I don’t even want to think about medical equipment right now.” She paused. “But... yeah. Well, kind of. It’s not sped up again, and the rate of progression is steady, even if it is still advancing. So it’s kind of like ‘no news is bad news , but it's the same bad news we already gave you like six months ago, nothing’s changed since then’.”

She wheeled a little closer, eying Chikaze. “What about you?”

Chikaze wrinkled her nose. “I feel horrid,” she said bluntly. “And nauseous and wobbly and my hair’s going to fall out again, and I really, really hate these bits.” She jerked her head at the intravenous drip beside her bed, threaded into her arm. “Them especially. It’s basically poison they’re pumping into me, you know. There’s just more of me than there is the cancer, so I survive and it doesn’t.” She sighed. “But the doctors say that it’s working well, and this might be one of the last rounds of chemo I need. S’just that it screws up my immune system as well, so while I’m on it I can’t come round to your place anymore.”

Hayate gave her a sympathetic look. “Too bad,” she said. “I was looking forward to next time. Want me to bake some cookies or something and bring them in next time?”

Chikaze shook her head immediately. “Eugh, no. Mum and Dad already bring me all the sweets I want, and I’m not allowed sugar so it’s all fake sweetener that tastes horrible.” She pouted. “What I really miss is dairy stuff. And _meat_. Man, I’d kill for a beef bowl. Or... like, some kind of pasty thing just packed with cheese and beef and pork and chicken and... sorry. I’m not keeping food down too well, so I’m hungry.”

Glancing back to Shamal beseechingly, Hayate found her already moving forwards, the door mysteriously shut behind her. A quick glance around confirmed that there was nobody outside, and then Shamal’s hands were wreathed in green, gently resting on Chikaze’s forehead and breastbone. Chikaze sighed happily as the nausea and other side effects diminished, relaxing as the healing magic soothed her belaboured system.

“Hmm,” murmured Shamal, clicking the rings of Klarwind together thoughtfully. “Well, your condition obviously isn’t _healthy_ , given the drugs in your system, but as far as I can tell, they don’t seem to be doing too much damage.”

Hayate had asked, soon after finding out that Shamal could heal, if she could cure Chikaze’s cancer. Both girls had been disappointed at the answer. The Knight of the Lake was a brilliant medic, but magic was not a miracle-worker. Leukaemia couldn’t be simply waved away even by the best of healing mages, and she could do little that wasn’t already being done by the chemotherapy. Without the authority to set the dosages, her hands were tied further. The best she could give Chikaze was relief from the side effects of the treatment, and something to take her mind off what she was going through.

To that end, she tapped the girl on the brow to get her attention, and switched to telepathy to address her. _‘So,’_ she inquired, _‘have you been keeping up with your practice?’_

Chikaze jumped. _‘Ah, yes!’_ she replied hastily, her telepathic voice a little faint and shaky, but audible. Raising her hands carefully so as not to get in Shamal’s way and cut off the flow of healing, she concentrated. Sea-green light built around her fingers, and snaked out in a thin wire towards the window latch, wrapping itself around the small metal bar. Chikaze crooked her fingers, and with a faint ‘click’ the latch slid back, pulled by the faint wire from across the width of the room.

Shamal raised an impressed eyebrow. _‘Very well done,’_ she remarked. _‘I_ am _impressed. Hayate hasn’t been able to get nearly so far yet. Signum might decide you’re ready for that training Device soon.’_

“Shama-!” Hayate began, and cut herself off halfway. Switching to telepathy, she finished her objection. _‘Shamal!’_ she whined. _‘That’s not my fault! You said my magic was all wonky because of the Book! And that it was still draining me, so I don’t even have much magic to work with! That’s the only reason I’m behind her!’_

Shamal chuckled. “If you say so, mistress, then I’m sure it must be true.” She cut the flow of magic and rose gracefully. “That’s about enough for now, I think. You feel better?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Chikaze sighed. She did feel better, but losing the healing magic still wasn’t nice. As soon as it stopped, the myriad aches and pains came back – lessened and reduced to a background hum for now, but unmistakably there and waiting to build back up once again.

“Anything fun happen?” she asked, to take her mind off it. Hayate grinned and nodded cheerfully, and a small smile twitched at Shamal’s lips despite herself.

“Vita _still_ hasn’t forgiven Zafira,” Hayate explained with amused fondness, “even if she stopped trying to hammer him when I told her off. So now he keeps finding wood chips and stuff in his bed, and she switched out the sugar for his cereal with salt this morning.” She sighed theatrically, though she was still grinning as she did so. “And he’s taken to quoting poetry to me when she can hear. Honestly, if they go any further with this silly grudge match, I’m going to have to step in and tell them to cut it out.”

“And tarnish a knight’s honour? Surely not,” Shamal put in. But she was smirking as she said it. “I’m sure they’ll settle down eventually,” she went on. “Honestly, I think part of the reason Zafira at least is taking part is that it’s making you laugh more. We like to see you happy.”

“Huh?” Hayate blinked, confused. “I am happy, though. I like taking care of you, you’re my family. I love having you around. The last few months have been some of the happiest I remember.”

Shamal ducked her head, flattered. “I know, and we appreciate it more than I can say. But even if you smile a lot, you don’t laugh very often. It’s mostly just with Chikaze that you take the time to... hmm... let yourself be a child. It’s nice for us to watch you having fun like that.”

Hayate nodded slowly, absorbing this. She opened her mouth once or twice to start a question or a comment, but hesitated before saying them. Eventually, she dismissed her train of thought with a quick shake of her head and turned to Chikaze to change the subject. “What about you?” she asked. “Has anything been happening here since we last saw each other?”

“Ha. No, nothing, as usual,” Chikaze griped, but paused. “... actually no, come to mention it, there was something weird. You know you came here with Signum last time?”

“Uh huh...” Hayate scooted a little closer, intrigued. The swordswoman was fairly reticent on most matters, and any gossip about her was more than enough to rouse her interest.

Chikaze nodded, eyes grave. “When she was gone, one of the new nurses came in, and he asked if she was my _mum!_ ”

“ _What?_ ” Hayate recoiled backwards, raising her hands in a warding gesture. “Eww! No! Signum? Signum can’t be your mum! Signum isn’t anyone’s mum! Signum as a mother is, like... ultra-weird universe-gone-wrong stuff!” She glowered. “That nurse must have been crazy!”

“See, you say that, but...” Chikaze bit her lip. “... he kind of had a point. I _do_ look a lot like her. She’s got the same skin and hair colour as me and even her face looks a little bit similar. But she’s... like, a magical alien or something. Why does she look like me? Why does she even look Japanese?”

Hayate folded her arms. “Well, they could be from space Japan,” she rationalised.

Behind Hayate, Shamal – almost forgotten by the pair – made a small, thoughtful noise. Two pairs of eyes swung around to land on her as she gave Chikaze a contemplative look and nodded to herself. “That would make sense, I suppose...” she mused, more to herself than either of the girls. “And possibly explain... hmm. Though...” She lapsed into thought again for a moment, frowning slightly, and was brought back out of it by Hayate impatiently clearing her throat.

“Shamal!” she whined. “You can’t just hint that you know about it like that and then not tell us! C’mon, give us an answer!”

“Hmm?” Shamal blinked and looked up at them. “Oh, yes, sorry. It’s... not enormously surprising that Signum resembles your friend in this incarnation, especially given how the two of you met. You said she saved your life?”

Twin nods were her reply, along with a shared glance and shiver between the girls at the memory of that awful day. Hayate had never explained the entire sequence of events that night to her Wolkenritter, only the rough outline – partly because she hadn’t really been fully conscious for much of it, and mostly because she didn’t really like thinking about it. But the general outline had been sketched out, interspersed by the occasional ultra-serious order regarding the living dead and the necessity that should any reveal themselves, they should be sought out and destroyed.

Shamal waited for them to look back to her before continuing. “We are your knights,” she said, calmly, “and you give us our forms as well as our armour. Your mind shaped our looks to whatever your subconscious thought would best serve our roles.” She smiled teasingly. “So when it went to create Signum, it gave you her role as a knight, a Blade, a powerful right hand to cut down your enemies and destroy those who threaten you.”

She nodded towards Chikaze, the teasing smile becoming a warm one. “Apparently, Hayate thinks very highly of you. You saved her, and so you were the strongest association that leapt to her mind when given that role. So Signum ended up with pink hair, and looks a little like you.”

Chikaze looked uncertain over whether to blush, be flattered or tease. Hayate had no such dilemma, and was turning a bright shade of red, resolutely looking anywhere in the room other than her friend. Shamal covered her smile with a hand and continued, giving them something else to focus on. “Myself I can understand – I think you may have thought of some of your nurses, and maybe your mother. My hair looks similar to hers, in the pictures you still have. And Zafira... well, he’s a bodyguard and a defender, it’s far from the first time he’s been fairly big and strong. But Vita... now, she’s a bit of a mystery. She’s normally male, and the largest of us; I honestly can’t remember a time she was quite so small.”

She shrugged. “Well, we’ve never been able to work out exactly how this works, and what our Master wants also plays a role beyond our function. And very few of our masters are quite as young as you when we instantiate. Perhaps... hmm. Perhaps you just wanted another friend your own age. A defence against loneliness, so to speak.”

Hayate and Chikaze traded poker-faced looks. But they didn’t get a chance to reply, for a barrage of distant shouting from down the hall distracted them. Hayate raised an inquisitive eyebrow, and Chikaze grinned.

“Heh. That’s the new girl,” she explained. “Some English name, starts with A. She goes off like that every so often. I think when she’s on the phone or something, because she didn’t have anyone else in there the last time. Though she also complained about being stuck in bed, which,” she grimaced, “I can definitely identify with.”

Hayate shook her head sadly. “Poor girl,” she sympathised. “Maybe we could go visit her and cheer her up?”

Shamal laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “It’s a thoughtful idea,” she put in, “but I’m afraid we should be getting back home. Visiting hours are nearly over, and Hayate needs to get started on dinner.” She winced. “Or else Signum might start preparing steak again.”

“Awww.” The mistress of the Book of Darkness looked up pleadingly at her loyal servant. “I want to stay just a bit longer?” It was probably meant to be an order, but came out as a question, which withered against Shamal’s placid expression. Hayate heaved a weary sigh, and pouted. “Fiiiiine,” she grouched, dragging the word out sulkily. “Bye, Chikaze. See you next time.”

“Assuming I haven’t got fed up of the food and escaped, yeah!” Chikaze called after her. “Promise you’ll shelter me if I go on the run from evil nurses!”

Already being rolled away by Shamal’s gentle urgings, Hayate waved over her shoulder with a giggle. “I promise!” she called back, as the door shut behind them.

...

A new star flared into brief life in the sky of Pihroea. To those who watched with the right eyes, however, it was clearly no stellar body, nor a satellite reflecting the sunlight. The wide-spectrum white noise was characteristic and unmistakeable. A stubby, almost-spherical spaceship now hung in the void. Its conventional engines glowed as it adjusted its orbit, and then shut down as it extended sail-like boons which glowed in the infrared.

“Right on schedule,” Admiral Harlaown said from her position at the bridge of the _Asura_. “Begin communications with the sprinter.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” reported the on-duty comms officer. “Handshaking now. Please wait a moment... okay, reading green.”

“Just as well,” Lindy said, shaking her head. “Losing an obsolete transport is one thing, but losing a sprinter would be... I don’t even want to think.” She pressed the panel in front of her. “ _BN-RTV Kalrow_ , this is Flotilla Admiral Harlaown on the _BN-DV Asura_.”

“ _Asura_ , this is the _Kalrow_ ,” said the uniformed man on the other side of the link. “We are carrying one mobile personnel and equipment cargo hold; requesting transfer connection permission to move it to your hold.”

“Permission granted,” Lindy said. “Operations, prepare the transfer connection to the prepared area in Hold Two. Chrono, go greet our guests.” 

There would be more than enough space; for all that a sprint ship such as this one was almost the size of a dimensional cruiser, almost all of that bulk was engine and reactors. The vessel itself was unarmed and unarmoured, built for a minimum mass and surface area to volume ratio. They existed for moving elite mages and high value objects – such as Lost Logia – around quickly and safely, not comfortably, without exhausting a mage with repeated teleports. They averaged a better speed than even elite mages over long distances; partly because the vessel didn’t tire in the same way that a human did, and partly because the enormous power generation capacity of those ships was enough to support microjump teleportation circuits.

Chrono made his way down to the hold. His black uniform was neatly pressed - even if he would prefer to be in his Barrier Jacket – and as he waited for the deck team to allow him in, he brushed some unseen lint off his collar. He still did not fully agree with his mother’s decision to call in the team of – well, it wasn’t quite fair to call them ‘misfits’, even if it was his personal opinion – the team of mages who had been the first backup he had received on the Jewel Seed Incident. In his opinion, the extra time they had spent locally was not going to make much of a difference; it was not as if they were real specialists on UA-97 and its inhabitants. And this could well be the Book of Darkness. If it was... a bunch of B- and C-rankers would be worse than useless, because they’d just be more linker cores to feed to the book.

But she had ordered it, and so he wouldn’t let it show.

The light on the hatch flicked to green, and his ears popped as the pressure between the hold and the surrounding corridors normalised. Transfers of something as large as a modular cargo hold always shifted the pressure around.

Hands in his pockets, Chrono watched as the umbilical power cables were connected up to the power sockets on the large bright orange building-sized module, and the deck team made sure the container was talking to the Asura’s systems. Just before they finished, his hands were withdrawn, and a quick-cast spell adjusted his hair. Standing to attention, he inclined his head to the weary mages who made their way out of the newly opened hatch.

“Welcome on board again,” he said. “We’re going to have to bring your team and you up to speed quickly.”

The older man blinked at Chrono. “They’re not my team anymore,” he said, after saluting. “But yes, Enforcer. Lieutenant Tiida Lanster reporting.” He suppressed a yawn. “Sorry, none of us have been sleeping well on the sprinter.”

The very tall blonde girl next to him worked her neck. “You can say that again,” Heidi Zwischenfall said, glowering. “The sleeping pods in those things are not made for people who aren’t shorties. Not one bit. We’re stacked like sardines in there. Where can we drop off our kit and will there be food in the briefing? They want us to get that thing emptied out quick.”

Chrono swept his eyes over the others, noting with surprise that the green-silvery haired one – Mei, that had been her name – was wearing a Ground Forces uniform, rather than the Air Forces one she had last time. And that they were not alone. There was another group of mages with them, older and looking no less worse for wear. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You would be the scanning specialists?”

“Warrant Officer Balani,” said the blond man in the lead, “and yes. Do you know where we should have our equipment stowed? It’s rather delicate and needs to not be bumped. I can’t emphasise this enough. We also have something from Admiral Graham to give to Flotilla Admiral Harlaown.”

“Talk with the deck staff; they’ll be handling the unloading,” Chrono said. “And...” his eyes widened in surprise. “You?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

Yuuno Scrya rolled his eyes. “Oh, great,” he said. “I spend a week in a cramped sprint-ship, and this is all the welcome I get. Your mother contacted me and asked me to come; I wasn’t doing anything better and...” he swallowed, “well, I do know the place.”

Chrono heard the muttered, “It wasn’t cramped for you; ferrets fit fine in the sleeping pods,” from Heidi, and ruthlessly suppressed his grin. “Well, I’ll check where your quarters are,” he said, with a straight face, “and then we can go to the briefing room. The Admiral wants everyone to know what we’re dealing with and the roles we’ll be playing.”

...

The briefing room smelt noticeably of coffee and bitter chocolate, as tired mages looked for wakefulness wherever they could get it. Lindy sipped from her mug of tea, the teabag still seeping, and put it down. “Thank you all for attending,” she said, by way of greeting. “Some of you I recognise from the Jewel Seed Incident six months ago; others are new. However, we have another issue on our hands – hopefully not as bad the last one – which seems to be linked to Unadministered World #97.

“Around six months ago, multiple Class 1 Lost Logia were accidentally released on UA-97. The wanted criminal, Precia Testarossa, appears to have been the one who engineered this incident, and she sent a magically-boosted clone of her deceased daughter to recover them for her. The containment and cleanup... could have gone better,” Lindy admitted, to winces from a fair amount of the audience, “and as a result the Jewel Seed Incident ended with the death of M. Testarossa and her accomplices and the destruction of her Alhazredian-era base of operations in a suicidal attempt to use the Lost Logias to reach Alhazred.

“Given that multiple dimensional quakes – of a fairly small magnitude in relative terms, thankfully – were induced during the course of the incident, there was no way that it could have been hushed up entirely, though naturally attempts were made to prevent the unauthorised release of information. Sadly, I fear there was probably a leak, because recently there have been multiple attacks on TSAB citizens and members of Aligned and Unadministered worlds in this area, culminating in an assault on a TSAB training facility on Pihroea which saw the destruction of the base and the theft of a cargo ship landed at the time. All the personnel present at the base, in addition to the crew of the ship, are currently missing; we have to hope that they are still alive.” 

She watched the backup team exchange worried glances with one another. They were at that facility when she had called them in for the Jewel Seed Incident; they would – probably – have moved on by now, but that was a concerning thing to contemplate.

“To be blunt,” she continued, “this area is a backwater. Runcorn is the nearest Administered world with any population worth speaking of, and it is almost six hundred lisecs from here. But the actions of Precia Testarossa revealed that there was at least one intact Alhazredian space station in the area, as well as Lost Logia.” She saw Yuuno Scrya’s hand go up. “Yes?” she asked.

“I’d just like to say that we found the Jewel Seeds out beyond UA97,” he said, lips thin, “in the tomb of... well, without going into more detail, it’ll suffice to say it was the leader of a breakaway faction of the Shutran Hegemons. The histories say he – it was a man – went crazy towards the end and took his armies out beyond the edge of known space... perhaps we’ll never know where he found them, but the Hegemony was located towards this side of the core worlds.”

Lindy nodded. “Yes. As I was just about to say, we do have evidence to suggest that there are unknown Warring States and Alhazredian-era ruins out here, and all it would take is a leak of this from anywhere in the Bureau for word to get out to criminal elements. We also cannot assume that whoever we’re up against won’t head for UA-97. For all we know, they might think there are some Jewel Seeds still remaining there, and even if they don’t, they’ll need to go there to try to backtrack the course that the Seeds took to get there.

She took another sip of tea, then folded her hands in front of her. “As a result, we will be using a two-pronged approach,” she said. “While most of our forces search for the missing ship, a small covert team will establish a base of operations on UA-97, with the monitoring experts watching for the Mithra and any unauthorised teleports to the vicinity of where the Jewel Seed incident occurred. Lieutenant Lanster will be the one in charge of that team, as they have on-world experience on UA97, though Warrant Officer Balani will have full operational control of the monitoring. We do recognise the risk that whoever did this may have already moved on having already investigated the world and finding no Jewel Seeds, but we can hope that they can be caught in our net. This team will be under strict order to avoid combat and blend into the local population; if hostiles engage them their standing orders are to retreat, protecting the technical specialists, and call for emergency assistance.”

“Well, I was sort of wondering why you were responding to the same mission,” the older man told Tiida, “and now I know. Pleased to be working with you.”

“And you,” Tiida said, smiling. His face went more serious. “Admiral Harlaown? Do you have any clues as to what assaulted and captured the transport? What might we be up against?”

The admiral took a deep breath. She was not sure what the reaction to this news would be. “As it stands, we do not know who our opponents are. However, from evidence gathered on Pihroea, as well as the investigative work of Major Grangeitz over the past week, has produced some disturbing suggestions.” She ceded the floor to the man, picking her mug up in both hands.

Zest was not wearing a uniform; he was still in his barrier jacket, as was the somewhat windblown Quint. They had been transferring from world to world, doing what – much as Lindy did not want to admit it – Chrono lacked the stamina for, and checking disparate population centres. They were the first representatives of the Bureau some of the worlds they were visiting had seen in decades; on a few, they had merely been placing teleport sensors on entirely uncontacted worlds. Nevertheless, compared to the fatigued travellers, he looked far too awake for anyone carrying out a punishing teleport schedule.

“Over the past four months,” the investigator said bluntly, “there have been assaults and vanishings across the area. Now that our attention has been drawn to this, there have even been mysterious linker core drainings as far away as Runcorn. No one had put it together before now – whoever’s doing this knows enough to pick them off during the night, using the same tactics we first discovered on Pihroea. We have no idea how many instances of this might have gone entirely unnoticed; the symptoms of core draining are similar to influenza, and no doubt many victims will have taken a week of bed rest and never reported it.”

“You have to understand,” Quint interjected, running her fingers through her hair, “this is really the backend of nowhere. That means that there just aren’t proper healthcare facilities like you might get in the central worlds. Over half the places we checked don’t do routine core checks on in-patients. You know, I looked up some population stats. If you discount UA97, Suionetheod has a larger population than everywhere within three hundred-odd lisecs of us right now. _Combined_. And UA97 has a larger population than everywhere within... like, a kilolisec combined, including Runcorn.”

“That we know of,” Lindy corrected. “The entire area is barely mapped; some of the maps we’re using date back to before a sizeable quake. The problem is, if they’ve taken the _Ravi_ and gone to ground, powered it down... well, they could be hiding it anywhere on a habitable world, they could have loaded up on food and supplies and gone quiet on a moon, they could even be drifting in deep space. We just don’t know.”

Zest cleared his throat. “Returning to the topic at hand,” he said, to nods from the two women, “there have also been disappearances similar, though not identical, to the attack on the _Ravi_. We have no hard evidence, but conferring with local authorities has revealed that some small population centres have just entirely vanished. A few remote villages, some missing farmsteads... it could be anything, but it’s suspicious. We have no obvious pattern for the vanishings, though. The assault on the Pihroea facility had two clear objectives – to capture the _Ravi_ and blind our sensors in the area; we lack a similar motive for any of the other suspicious occurrences.

“However,” he continued, face grave, “it is felt that there is enough evidence to confirm that there is a Harvester-type Lost Logia in use in this area. Given whoever controls it was able to take down a TSAB facility, that sets a minimum classification of Class 2, with a chance that it is Class 1.” He paused. “Harvester-type Lost Logia are dangerous because they can often be subtle, at least until they have gathered sufficient mana to activate fully or their master feels they have gained enough power. This is not to be treated lightly, given the limited number of high-grade Harvesters known about, such as...”

“The Book of Darkness.” The words came out as a hiss, and the source surprised Lindy. Mei Ereignis, from the backup team was staring at the start chart with her eyes narrowed into slits. Beside her, her half-sister had turned the colour of milky chocolate.

“That’s the most infamous one, yes,” Zest said, eyes locking on the green-silver haired girl, “but by no means the only one. There are still other Harvester Lost Logia based off the Book of Darkness out there, even though they – unlike the original – can be sealed, and that’s before we get into the other types of Harvester out there. We will not be assuming that whatever we are up against is the Book unless we have more concrete evidence.”

“False assumptions could come back to bite us,” Quint added, “so we’re not ruling anything out just yet. Don’t let it get personal.” She gave Mei a warning look, and after a moment’s thought expanded it to Chrono as well. “I mean it. Taking this case personally will lead to you getting emotional and sloppy. And that will lead to you getting killed. We would all prefer to avoid that. Understood?”

...

A few hours later in the mess hall on the Asura, the newcomers were digging into food. They were doing so with relative enthusiasm, as it was of considerably better quality than what they had been getting on the sprinter. Despite that, the air was gloomy.

“So,” Heidi said, sarcastic cheerfulness in her voice, “we’re doomed. Again. I’m going to die with the A-ranking on my record still in current memory.” She stabbed her fork into her meal. “You know they almost stationed us on Sveren instead of Pihroea, for that training? We’d have avoided getting into two cases full of certain doom if we’d gone there.”

“We’re not... doomed,” Tiida said, somewhat more weakly than he would have liked. “I mean, we’re simply there to be support.”

“Oh, that’s just wonderful,” Heidi drawled. “You mean like how we were meant to just be on the Garden of Time for support? I’m sure nothing at all will go wrong when we’re protecting some sensor specialists from a Class-2 Harvester, minimum, which may be the Book of Darkness itself!”

“You know,” the voice came from behind them, “talking like that is a pretty big breach of OpSec.”

Heidi winced, and spun, saluting Quint. “Uh... um...”

“Oh, relax,” the older woman said, bringing her own stacked tray down to their shared table. “I was just here to eat, not get on your backs about it. You won’t believe what all these transfers are doing to my energy intake; I’m in double food and I’m still losing weight.”

“Th-that’s certainly something,” Rizu said, from where she had been staring at her meal. “I don’t think it’ll have much popularity as a diet.”

Quint laughed. “Well, probably not,” she admitted, scratching her cheek and sitting down. “I thought I might as well try catching up with you lot, as well as... uh, perhaps reassuring you a little about your role in this.”

“I could use some reassuring,” Tiida admitted. “I didn’t think it would be good if I was being called all the way from Mid to here, but I didn’t... well, I didn’t know what to think. I really hope it isn’t the Book of Darkness for real, though.”

“I think we all do,” Quint agreed.

“It killed my dad,” Mei whispered, her hands balled into fists on her lap.

“What?”

Rizu winced, and cleared her throat. She patted her sister on the arm, who glanced at her, and nodded. “H-her dad,” she began, nervously, “n-not mine, just hers... uh. Well, y-you know how last time it escaped when they tr-tried to destroy it? Uh.”

“It was a massive search, across lots of planets to try to find it in the first place,” Mei said, still staring at her food. “Lots and lots of people; a big, massive sweeping effort. My dad was Ground Forces; he was in a platoon which found where the master was hiding out. Just stumbled across it; they weren’t expecting it.” She looked up, mismatched eyes narrowed. “Well, of course they got cut to shreds. They were a Ground Forces formation; most of them were just B-rank at best, and the _lowest_ ranked one of those _things_ it has is a double-A. They... they said he threw himself at one of them trying to give the rest of his squad time to get away.” She laughed, bitterly. “Well, he’s the one I get it from. It didn’t even _work_. The Book got away cleanly. It took them months to track the master down again. So it was just... pointless.”

“I’m sorry,” Quint offered sadly.

“I don’t even remember it,” Mei said, with an affected half-shrug. “Rizu remembers more of him than I do.” She took a deep breath. “But with the new meds, I now get scared and... and I don’t know if how I feel is worse, or... or what would probably happen if I didn’t have them and... and how it would affect everyone.”

“Well, firstly,” the older woman said, “Admiral Harlaown meant it when she said this is purely an observational posting. Your job is to help the monitoring team blend in, keep stuff working on-world, and there’s a few other minor things that need to be done, but me and Zest and Chrono are going to be the hard-hitters. If you catch something, you call us in.” She cocked her head. “Though I’d rather have Megane here,” she admitted, “but... eh. She’d totally have shown up with the baby, and that’s not good for morale.”

A weak giggle escaped from Mei and Rizu, and even Tiida smirked.

“So, how have you lot been? I have had an _awful_ past six months,” Quint said, nursing her cup of soup, “so, please, humour me. Mei, you said something about meds?” She peered at the girl. “So something did come out of those checks that me and Megane told you to get?”

Mei nodded, obviously forcing her darker thoughts to the back of her head. “Yeah. They took me in for checks, took blood, and then two weeks later, I found out I’m a princess.”

“... oh my,” Quint said, raising an eyebrow.

Heidi snorted, nostrils flaring. “You are not a princess.”

“Am too! I’m totally packed with Hegemon gene-markers from my father’s side!”

“That doesn’t make you a princess! I’m sorry,” Heidi apologised, “but she was far too smug about that on the way here.”

Mei folded her arms. “Look, the Shutran Hegemony isn’t around anymore, I’ve got the gene markers and the hair colour and the mismatched eyes, and I’ve got the mucked-up head which can’t properly tell when to be scared. So I’m allowed to do at least that.” She shrugged. “But yeah, Quint. You can check my file if you want the full details – ‘cause I don’t understand them – but basically, my dad’s side traces back to the Shutran Hegemons, and I’ve got just enough of the genes to make me not quite right in the head. Though I’ve got a drug implant which helps with it now, and they went through my entire file and tagged ‘mitigating circumstances – undiagnosed Berserker lineage’ to a bunch of the black marks.” She forced herself to grin. “It means it’s basically spotless when it’s adjusted for that,” she said, gloating. “Better than Heidi’s.”

“Hush, you!”

“Anyway, yeah.” Mei massaged the back of her neck. “See, uh... I wanted to thank you for that, actually, and also for that advice you gave me about looking into specialist training programmes. I... see, this is kind of hard. Basically, I kind of only went for the Air Force because I wanted to be with Rizu, you know? Like, I knew I needed to have her around, because Mum and her both knew I wasn’t quite right. And Rizu’s off at a proper medical school now with a scholarship and everything, so there was nothing really keeping me in the Air Force.” 

“Which one?” Quint asked.

“Uh...” Rizu bit her lip. “B-Belhausen. It’s on Laroche.”

“That’s one of the really big ones, isn’t it? Like, the famous ones?”

Rizu nodded, blushing. “The... the recommendations for the Jewel Seed Incident... uh, they were enough to get me onto the v-very limited TSAB intake they do each year. Or... uh, maybe next year, because of... of this thing.”

“Good on you,” Quint said cheerfully. “But... Mei, you said you looked at specialist training courses?”

“Yeah, and then I looked at you and the way you talked about how I should look for what I wanted to do, and in the end, I met someone and he recommended that I look into the Outrider specialist thing.” She grinned. “I couldn’t meet the power requirements to get into the CQC thing you did,” she told Quint.

“Outriders?” Quint said. “Scouting and recon on low density worlds? I have to say, I didn’t think you’d go for that.”

“I _aced_ the entrance exam,” Mei said, beaming. “And the fact my file had two recommendations from admirals and one from Captain Grangeitz. It’s been _amazing_. Tough as hell, and they spent all morning chasing us around and all afternoon making us study technical stuff and tracking and wildlife and living off the land and stuff, but at least it’s not the Air Forces and the way they make you feel inadequate because you can’t hit A-rank, no matter how hard you try. _And_ I have my board with me, so I can fly with it.” She looked at Quint, a trace of moistness around her eyes. “I wouldn’t have managed it if you hadn’t told me to get checked up,” she said.

Quint smiled. “You know what? That’s the best thing I’ve heard since the damn Jewel Seed Incident started,” she said. “I’m just glad I could help.” She took a sip of soup, and half-turned to the other members of the former squad. “And you?”

“Nothing so fancy,” Tiida said, with a self-effacing grin. “I spent a few months getting over almost dying, and then they put me on a desk job back on Mid while I got back into shape. I was just waiting for my new placement when this whole thing came up. But I do have,” he fished a blued-steel Device out of his pocket, “this. Commendations from admirals really help when you’re on the waiting list for an upgrade. It’s an ED-104A series; way better throughput, enhanced buffer for refire casing, Semi-Intelligent autoguard, and integrated cartridge system.” He lowered his voice. “Someone said to me,” he said, “that the Jewel Seed Incident is one of the reasons they’re looking to roll them out more – we’re the ones with the supply lines, not the rogues. Of course, others say it’s the military-industrial complex just looking for some nice fat contracts to reequip the Bureau.”

“Personally, I’d say it’s the latter,” Heidi said, drily. “But I’ve benefitted from it, too. Scraped my A-rank exam... raw power’s my problem, but managed to make it onto the Designated Aerial Marksman programme. We all got issued shiny new Cartridge-loaded Devices there, too. Though bombardment mages have always used them more, because we need as much speed and power as possible.”

“Oh, and my little sister decided that you’re really cool after you met her,” Tiida told Quint, his face dead serious. “I want you to know what you’ve done. She’s been putting low-friction barriers on the floor and skating around in her socks. This is entirely your fault.” His mouth twitched.

Quint bit her lip. “However will I be able to apologise?” she asked, trying not to laugh.

“I feel there can be no forgiveness for such a sin,” Tiida told her. “At least until she gets bored with it, which may take as long as... uh, maybe a month at most.”

“Hey! I’m not boring!” Quint managed, cracking up. She wiped her eyes on a napkin, smiling, and caught the eyes of the last member of the table. He wasn’t smiling. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I’m... regretting coming for this,” Yuuno said, in a small voice. “Not just eating here with you – though you’re all older and talking about things that... well, not just here. But here. Back to Earth. It was fine when travelling but... I didn’t think you’d want me to go back there.”

“Oh,” Quint said, shuffling along the bench so she was facing the boy. “Yes, that... like, I know why she – Lindy – couldn’t tell you for OpSec, but she should have said something. You can probably still bow out or something.”

“I could,” Yuuno said, hands on his lap. He avoided her eyes. “But... if there’s a Harvester out there, if it’s coming for Earth...” he trailed off. “Nanoha would have helped no matter what,” he managed eventually.

There was an awkward silence, broken only by the sound of cutlery on plates.

“If... if she’d been here, if she’d turned back, she could have been here,” Yuuno said. “And she’d be here, and she’d know how to fit in on UA97, and I wouldn’t be having to help you when most of my time there was as a ferret.”

“You d-don’t have to help us,” Rizu said firmly.

“I do. She... she would have wanted it. And, well, I guess I was just sort of... drifting,” Yuuno said, with a helpless shrug. “I haven’t been able to focus, or... I got credit for that ship you recovered, and I can’t even bring myself to look at it because it’s got her face on it. Sometimes it feels like I see her wherever I go. I... I just don’t know what I want to do with my life now.”

Rizu patted his hand. “W-well,” she suggested. “You are... um. Nine years old. It’s sort of allowed.”

“Ten, now,” he said, without a trace of rancour.

“Well, when I was ten, I was still j-just running around, playing,” the older girl said. She tilted her head. “Uh, f-fine, I was running around, trying to keep Mei out of trouble but still.”

Mei patted her on the hand. “And you did a really good job of it,” she said seriously. “Really, I don’t thank you enough. Like, you know, when they diagnosed me, they were totally amazed at how clean my record was, relatively speaking. Most of the people with stuff wrong like this end up in jail or worse – if Dad’d been diagnosed, maybe he’d have survived.” She sighed, stretched, and rose to get seconds, but paused a few steps away. “Look,” she told Yuuno over her shoulder, “you’re being really brave, even if you’re scared of stuff. Not knowing what fear is isn’t bravery; that’s just being an idiot.”

“Like you,” Heidi muttered.

“Right! Like me!” Mei said, nodding. “I’m an _expert_ at doing stupid things which aren’t actually that brave! I have life-long experience at it! Trust me when I said that it’s really easy to do things other people say are brave when your brain isn’t feeling scared. But you’re going to be helping us even though you’re feeling all bad about her – and I’m feeling kinda bad about her, too, because she did save all our lives from a giant horrible robot monster thing! Well, you know, if we can find this ship of people or catch whoever did it to them, this’ll make a big difference, right? And that’s all that matters.”

Yuuno looked up, a watery smile on his face. “I’ll need to think about that,” he said, “but thank you. I think... yes. Thank you.”

...

Forty miles from the nearest settlement and in the middle of the deep winter season, the stretch of land off the coast of an inland sea on Unadministered World #105 saw little life or movement. A light snowstorm was adding to the white blankets that covered everything in sight, and any animals that made it their home were deep in hibernation underground, safely away from cold bitter enough to kill within minutes. The water was frozen over in these dark, cold months, and the snow lay heavy enough on it that it was impossible to tell where the land ended and the sea began. Bleak, barren and inhospitable even during the summer months, it had seen no human life in years.

But it saw some now. With a flash of pink light that briefly lit the swirling snowflakes, a young girl occurred, grey-clad and with a small grey shape huddled in the hood of her Barrier Jacket. A hood which was somewhat superfluous, given the helmet she wore, but which was there nonetheless. The curled-up form occupying it shivered immediately and stuck out a small pink tongue.

 _‘Eurgh._ Snow _. Can’t we set our super-special trouble trap somewhere else? Like somewhere warm, or sunny, or with rabbits?’_

Nanoha shook her head. _‘Too late for that now.’_ She shot a glare back over her shoulder. _‘And don’t think you’re off the hook about that, either. A welcome-back present was a nice thought to have, but a dead rabbit is not the right kind of thing to give people. Even Linith.’_

She turned back to surveying the area, ignoring the quiet grumbling from behind her neck suggesting that she didn’t understand feline customs and was being cruel and oppressive in stifling their native rituals.

Only a moment later, a softer yellow flash announced another arrival a few hundred metres away, and Fate flew up to join them. Arf was just visible peeking over her shoulder from her backpack seat, and her Barrier Jacket was back to the grey-white it had been in Schzenais, to better blend in with the elements. Like Nanoha, she was helmeted – they weren’t risking the loss of processing power that disguising their magic would take, but hiding their faces was a step that both Linith and Precia had insisted on.

“It worked,” she greeted softly. “Did you pump extra juice into the teleport or something? I felt it from a world away.”

“... ah heh. Yes? Yes, I was... deliberately a bit sloppy,” agreed Nanoha hastily, blushing faintly. “And that’ll make them think I’m not very good, right? And easy prey.”

Fate made an unconvinced sound, but nodded anyway. “Me, too,” she reminded. “Assuming they know we’re supposed to be meeting here. What exactly did you tell Arisa, anyway? You left it late.”

“Precia said to. So that they wouldn’t have long to think about it, if they picked it up. So I asked how she was doing and stuff, and then told her I was meeting my friend who was coming in to help, and that I had to wrap up warm and go.”

“Hmm.” Behind the mirrored plate that covered her face, Fate pursed her lips. “Well, let’s hope they buy it. If they’re looking for it, or just around this planet, they’ll have sensed you coming in.” She glanced around at the driving snow coming down all around them. “Visibility isn’t good, but we should probably get some distance from where we came in, just in case. Up or down?”

Arf nudged her in the back. _‘Up,’_ she offered. _‘You’ll blend in better against the clouds with the falling snow below you. And mask your heat signatures or you’ll stand out like a Nanoha.’_

“Hey!”

Arf grinned and corrected herself. _‘Okay, sorry. You’ll stand out like a Nanoha when she’s reading a maths textbook in history class.’_

One among their number pouting at the unfairness of her friends and the way that Fate tattled on her, the quartet ascended higher. Visors slid across their eyes, and heat readouts superimposed themselves over everything in sight. The general trend was one of large amounts of blue.

And on the horizon, a line of grey, fast approaching. She felt Fate tense beside her.

 _‘Here we go...’_ Arf murmured.

From the distance in front of them, a reddish-grey wall approached, engulfing the landscape. It washed over the quartet, tinting the sky a deep violet and dulling the colours around them to monochrome – though in light of the heavy layer of cloud above and the colours around them being mostly white, this wasn’t especially noticeable.

What was noticeable, however, was the way the snow shuddered and froze in the air as their imprints were shifted into the barrier-space. Suspended motionless halfway between ground and sky, the flakes looked like a million flecks of chaff littering the battlefield-to-be. Wonderingly, Nanoha reached out to brush one nearby. It was cold, but not as cold as she expected of a snowflake. More like a sort of artificial chill, a holdover from its properties back on the other side of the barrier, now lost as it dissolved under her touch.

_‘Nanoha! Incoming!’_

Her attention snapped back to the business at hand, and the streaks of heat coming in from their left. There were four of them, all small and moving at high speed, and she brought Raising Heart up hastily to counter them before they got too close.

[Divine Shooter]

Four streaks of pink light shot forth, carving thin paths through the frozen snow as they each curved out to meet the reddish projectiles head on. Four explosions resounded a second later, as they detonated on contact. The echoes reflected strangely off the barren landscape below, distorted by the snow and ice powder filling the air.

“Where...” began Nanoha, glancing around warily. But she was interrupted by Raising Heart and Bardiche both. The two Intelligent Devices blared a warning, and Nanoha’s attention followed it upwards to the scarlet missile falling on them from out of the heavy clouds above.

In perfect synchronicity, Nanoha and Fate split apart, darting in opposite directions. Nanoha rippled and vanished as she did so, while Fate departed in a yellow blur of speed. Inwardly, though, Nanoha was smiling grimly. Red clothing and... yes, that dratted hammer. It was the same knight she had fought at Arisa’s house. She’d been both hoping and dreading it would be, and not just because of the injury’s she’d taken last time. On the one hand, her last attempt at fighting this knight had gone poorly indeed. But on the other, knowing their opponent’s skillset through first-hand experience gave them a distinct advantage.

 _‘It’s her,’_ she confirmed shortly. _‘Lucky us. Remember the plan.’_

 _‘I remember.’_ Fate’s voice, steely with confidence, soothed Nanoha’s trepidations. _‘Whenever you’re ready.’_

The knight had altered her course in response to them splitting up, heading after Fate in the absence of a Nanoha to track. Taking aim at her back, Nanoha let loose a flurry of shooting spells as flew sideways, zigzagging her course to stay undetected.

The half-dozen pink bolts cut towards the Breaker, homing in on her from both sides to box her in. They struck sparks from the triangular shield she conjured to guard her back as Fate darted in from her other side, flanked by another half-dozen golden blades.

Bardiche shifted just as Fate swung, switching from its axe formation to the blazing golden scythe. The change was sudden and unexpected, and one that Fate had used in the past to take Nanoha off-guard with stunning success. But against the knight, it got her nothing but a faint widening of the eyes. The girl’s grip on her hammer shifted even as she brought it up to block, and the shafts of the two polearms clashed together. The angle of the parry sent Bardiche off to the side and forced Fate to hastily duck the hammerhead as it swung towards her face. Her shooting spells hit home, half a dozen in quick succession, but had little effect besides drawing a grimace from their target.

Even that small victory was lost when she swung the mallet out again, and the head shifted form into the same intimidating rocket that had broken Raising Heart. It loaded no cartridge, but spoke in an angry, harsh-sounding tone.

[Panzergeist! Pferde!]

Just as before, whirlwinds of light encircled her feet and a red aura sprung to life around her, strongest and darkest over her left hip where the dark tome Nanoha had seen her use at Arisa’s house rested in a holster. Nanoha bit her lip. _‘Fate,’_ she sent quickly. _‘That’s the defence spell she used on me. And I think the speed one. Be careful.’_

Fate didn’t answer with words, only a brief feeling of affirmation. It was all she had time for, as the rocket on the hammer ignited with a roar and the knight exploded towards her, leaving a trail of grey-white smoke behind her. The snow sizzled and hissed into steam around the pair as they whirled and flung themselves through the sky like dogfighters. Fate kept up a steady stream of Photon Lancers as she ducked and dodged, but barely one in ten connected. The knight snuffed them out with crisp, efficient blows, batting them aside with hammer and fist alike and responding with glowing metal bullets that screamed through the air and left a trail of detonations along Fate’s flight path.

Nanoha’s efforts were scarcely more effective. Pink bullets cut trails of mist through the frozen snow as Nanoha moved ghost-like around the fight. But the range she was shooting from meant that her shots took precious seconds to reach their target – seconds the Breaker used to roll out of their path, not even bothering to turn around or acknowledge them. The few that did get through broke harmlessly against the scarlet aura wreathing her. Fate had more success when she risked melee to deliver punishing scythe slashes to the arms or torso, but the hammer was there every time, viciously swiping at Bardiche’s core or the centre of her barrier jacket. Binds in both orange and pink hampered the Breaker’s movements. But it still wasn’t enough.

Left without Fate’s speed or the rocket-powered boost of the hammer, Nanoha would have been left behind quickly had Fate not limited her movements to keep the battle within her range. But it was a limitation that worked against her. Red and yellow swerved closer and closer together as Fate tried to keep the fight from straying too far, and Nanoha bit her lip as flashes of orange began to appear, turning aside grazing blows that came closer and closer to landing.

Worse yet, despite Fate’s greater speed, the knight seemed uncannily able to predict where she would attack or dodge to. Fate was faster, but sheer experience was tilting the fight in the knight’s favour. Nanoha threw her weight behind Arf’s in a bind that held the hammer still for a full second, saving Fate from a blow to the shoulder and allowing her to get in a slash to the sternum. Judging her friend safe for the moment as she disengaged, Nanoha thought furiously.

Melee was too dangerous. Despite Fate’s speed, the knight was simply too good – feints and surprise meant nothing to her. Shooting spells were nearly useless against the combination of hammer and defensive field, and at the range Nanoha was firing from, she was able to dodge most of them.

So she needed something bigger. Something faster. Something with more of a kick.

 _‘Fate,’_ she sent. _‘I have an idea. Can you lead her into position?’_ Raising Heart chimed as it sent coordinates, and a casting circle spun into being beneath Nanoha’s feet. She lowered herself onto it as she gathered power, aiming carefully at a patch of sky close to the two darting forms. The casting rings extended out from Raising Heart’s tip, forming a barrel longer than Nanoha was tall, and she sighted along it carefully.

 _‘Ready?’_ Fate’s mental voice was terse and tense, the touch of her mind felt like metal wire, pulled taut with stress and effort.

 _‘Ready,’_ Nanoha confirmed, and Fate broke off from the dogfight and sped right, through the projected path of the beam and out again to safety, with the Breaker hot on her tail. Adrenaline rippled up Nanoha’s spine as she waited until the Breaker was a few short metres from the line of fire.

And fired.

[Divine Buster]

The shooting spells had taken seconds to reach the knight. But bombardment spells travelled much, much faster. The beam lanced out faster than the eye could follow, and a juggernaut of light smashed into the Cloud Knight with all the force and fury of a train collision. The beam split as it met its target, pink streamers coming off in all directions like a water stream parting as it met a boulder. Huge clouds of steam boiled off the sides of the bombardment as it vaporised the snow, wreathing caster, target and the line between them in a scalding fog lit brilliantly from within.

When it petered out, the red defensive aura was gone. The knight, however, was not. And she looked very, very unhappy.

“Eep!” Nanoha squeaked, as the rocket lit up again and the knight shot towards her.

 _‘Don’t worry mistress! We’re still cloaked!’_ Vesta reminded her. _‘And I’m here to protect you this time!’_ She paused for a beat before adding, _‘but you should still get out of the way so I don’t have to!’_

Nanoha nodded and cast a Flash Move, blurring away from the steam cloud that marked her previous position. She kicked up, gaining altitude to put more distance between her and her attacker, and looked down to see where the knight was.

_‘Mistress!’_

Something kicked her hard in the upper back, and a bone-shaking roar split the air. She rippled into visibility as she tumbled forward and turned, feeling the lightness in her hood. A frighteningly short distance away, Vesta was in her war form, locked in combat with the very knight she’d been looking for. The girl must have been bare metres behind her when Vesta had kicked off to intercept her, if that! How had she found them? They were hidden, invisible, not just by Vesta’s cloak but by the...

... the snow. The frozen snow, which they left channels in whenever they moved. Of course she’d been able to find them, they were announcing their presence with a giant arrow of clear air pointing to where they were! She lifted Raising Heart, the equations of a Divine Shooter flurry slamming into place.

But Vesta was attacking furiously enough that Nanoha couldn’t get a clear shot at her opponent. Bloody, bladed light extended from her claws as she swiped and bit at the knight, ducking the hammer with feline grace and lunging for the throat, ten-centimetre fangs bared. Once, twice, three times and more the spiked point of the hammer tore through her head, torso or limbs, only to meet no resistance besides a dissolving illusion. Claws and fangs tore long rents in the gothic red dress, and slashed long, shallow gashes in the skin below as the knight sacrificed defence on her right side to protect her left, and the book holster that hung there. She tightened her defence and lengthened her swings, but still caught only glancing impacts with the shaft on a quick, agile opponent whose image was never where her body was.

And, finally, lost patience. “Rrrgh... _enough!_ ” she shouted. A fist-sized ball of pulsing red-white light grew in her hand, and grew to the size of her head as she tossed it in the air and brought her hammer around to...

The explosion of light, sound and force tore Vesta’s illusion apart and flung her backwards into Nanoha hard enough to knock both of them out of the sky. Despite her surge protectors, despite the protection of her Barrier Jacket, her ears rung and her eyes stung as she blinked frantically, unable to see or hear anything more than a blur. She could feel Vesta writhing and yowling in pain as they fell, and the dazed fog filling her head clogged her attempts at a flight spell. Squeezing her aching eyes shut, she braced for impact and hoped for the best.

...

Fate watched helplessly as Nanoha fell, blinking the spots out of her own eyes and nursing the multitude of livid bruises that stood out all over her arms and legs. The white-grey tangle of shapes, too far away to reach in time, vanished into a snowdrift which hopefully broke their fall. Pinging Nanoha telepathically got a response, albeit one that was mostly pained groaning, so Fate marked her down as ‘safe for now’ and turned her attention back to the knight.

Who was glaring at her. And Fate could guess why. Her and Nanoha’s shots were little more than bruises, their binds were ineffective, but the simple fact of the matter was that there were four of them and only one knight. The scorch marks from Bardiche’s scythe-blade and the rents from Vesta’s claws stood out starkly on her red dress, and she was panting from the exertion of the flashbang spell.

They were winning.

It was slow, painful and gruelling, but they were winning. Nanoha was down, but she would be back up again in a few moments. Between Fate’s speed and Nanoha’s cloaking, she couldn’t reliably land a blow on either, and the combination of speed and long-range bombardment was enough that she couldn’t escape, either. Cartridges would give her more power, but if she couldn’t land a hit they would be useless. Unless she had something special in reserve, she was effectively done for. It might take them hours, but they _could_ win this.

And she knew it.

Vivid blue eyes narrowed hatefully in Fate’s direction, and the knight scowled. She looked down, and for a moment she seemed to be struggling with something. One hand dropped to the Book at her hip, but hesitated, and then slowly returned to the hammer. Fate waited, tense and wary for any reignition of hostilities. She was perfectly happy to wait until Nanoha got back up, since taking the knight on singlehandedly wasn’t an attractive-sounding prospect, but she wasn’t about to let the Breaker try anything. This was one of the Wolkenritter, after all. The chances were good that she _did_ have something in reserve, somewhere. Fate would just have to stop her from using it.

Finally, her enemy looked up at her. Resolve was writ large across her face, and there was a certain look of grim satisfaction in her eyes that Fate was less than comfortable with.

“You forced this,” she said, conversationally. The hammer shifted forms again. The spike retracted, the rocket withdrew. And as it restructured, it got bigger. Considerably bigger. The sleek, slender cylinders of its base form were replaced with two heavy octagonal blocks, each bigger than the girls’ head. It seemed to radiate blunt force and trauma. “So you have only yourselves to blame.”

She twirled the massive weapon effortlessly. It should probably, Fate guessed, have weighed almost half a tonne. In the knight’s hands, it moved like a child’s toy.

A casting triangle appeared in front of her, flat edge parallel to the ground, a surface pointing straight down. It spun for a moment before stabilising, one point directed towards her, the flat edge oriented away. Fate readied half a dozen Photon Lancers, taking the time to layer a detonation effect and bind into their sub-structure. Still, she couldn’t help but give the knight a confused look. What kind of spell was this?

And then she caught the flicker above her head, and looked up. At the scarlet casting sigil the size of a city block which had spread across the sky above them. Her eyes widened in fear as the sound of a cartridge loading pulled her gaze back down, and she fired off the Photon Lancers. Hoping they would distract the knight long enough for her to disrupt the control sigil, she flung herself forwards...

[Sagitta Luminis]

A smoky-grey arrow smashed into the knight’s hip, and it was only through a miracle of reaction that she managed to catch the book as it was dislodged. The sigil above them dissolved along with its control node, and Fate pulled up short in confusion. That... hadn’t been Nanoha, who was just floating up to join her. It had come from...

The figure it had come from burst into view from within the static snowstorm, arrowing towards the knight single-mindedly. Fate caught only a glimpse – an adult, masked and wearing an anonymous grey Jacket like Nanoha’s. The knight brought her hammer around in a vicious swing that nearly took the figure’s head off, but it was undeterred. It pursued her as she rose away, her hammer shifting back into its smaller form as she struggled to fend it off one-handed. It didn’t attack, nor did it try to defend itself apart from dodging. Every effort, every motion it made was oriented towards one goal: the book.

Nanoha and Fate traded glances, honestly unsure of what to do. To help the knight would be madness, given their goal, but the masked figure’s silent, single-minded assault for the book was hardly any more encouraging. Fate shook her head in response to Nanoha’s questioning look.

 _‘They’re ignoring us,’_ she decided. _‘Bombardment spells on three. Aim for where they’re drifting.’_

Nanoha nodded resolutely, and they rose together, gaining height until they were above the close-quarters brawl. The masked figure was moving with unnatural flexibility and feline grace, Fate noted – more than most mages could hope to achieve, even with an inertial Barrier Jacket helping. She winced as it bent backwards almost ninety degrees to dodge a cartridge-boosted swing, and began charging her Thunder Smasher.

But even as she watched, the knight _spun_ , bringing the hammer round in an arc, never ceasing its motion. It came back around with a whirring sound – far faster, far stronger – and the masked figure was still off-balance and bent awkwardly from the previous stroke. It tried its best, but the hammer grazed its arm nonetheless.

The _crack_ of breaking bone was audible even from a hundred metres away. Nanoha winced in sympathy.

That seemed to drain the fight out of the figure, and it turned on its heel and fled. The knight pursued it for a short distance, but broke off, apparently deciding that it wasn’t worth it. She stowed the book back on her hip and looked around, frowning, trying to find the girls.

Her expression when she saw the bombardment spells pointed at her was one that Fate would remember for a long time, with no small amount of satisfaction.

[Divine Buster]  
[Thunder Smasher]

Pink and gold destruction hammered down on the injured knight.

And stopped cold, scattered into component motes.

“Wh... what?” Nanoha gaped. Fate stared. _Another_ masked figure had appeared, teleporting right into the path of the beam in the instant before they fired. This one was dressed very similarly to the first one; perhaps it was dressed in a lighter shade, but in the gloom of the barrier and the snow she wasn’t sure. Certainly, it gave no more clues to its identity as the previous one had. She tried to zoom in with Raising Heart and get a closer view of it, but a heat-haze wavered around it, and lines of static filled her scope. 

[Hostile EMCM detected,] Raising Heart reported. [Attempting EMCCM.]

The figure, as far as she could determine intent from behind the mask, was staring at her. A whirling dark blue shield hung in the air before it, dimmed from the strain of holding off two bombardment spells. It half-turned to the knight behind it, without taking its eyes off them or moving from its guarding stance.

She glared at it distrustfully. But red light built around her in a teleport spell, as the masked figure covered her. Nanoha lifted Raising Heart, but Fate stopped her.

“It stopped two bombardment spells almost point blank,” she murmured. “We’re not getting past it before the Breaker’s gone. There’s no point in trying.”

Nanoha grimaced, but relented, settling into a ready stance as the red-clad knight disappeared.

“Now,” Fate continued, “what will this one do?” She tensed, her hands tightening around Bardiche.

But the masked figure didn’t attack. With a short, mocking bow towards the two, it sketched a blue veil around itself. As the barrier around them collapsed, and shunted them back into the real world, it faded to leave nothing but the falling snow.

 _‘What the heck was that about?’_ asked Arf, bewildered. _‘Who were those two? What did they want?’_ Fate could only shake her head in mystification and trepedition.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I think Mother needs to hear about this.”

...


	6. Chapter Five

Far from Earth, orbiting it at a distance of several light-minutes, a rickety ship jolted and juddered through the turbulent currents of the Dimensional Sea. The suspension absorbed most of the shaking, but it was old, and enough got through to make the interior a chorus of clanks and groans. It sounded like an elderly curmudgeon griping and grousing about the aches and pains in its joints. On the upper level, a woman sat upright in bed, surrounded by medical machinery and frowning slightly as she studied the holographic windows she had open around her. Her eyes flicked from one to the other, a pale finger darting between them, highlighting lines and paragraphs to cross-reference elsewhere.

The door to the small cabin opened, and Linith slipped in, ears still slightly damp from snowmelt. Precia glanced up from her work, tapped a few more search terms in, and then dismissed the windows with a wave of her hand.

“It went well?” she asked, wasting no time.

Linith inclined her head, shifting to her cat form and jumping up onto the bed. _‘It went very well,’_ she confirmed. _‘The girls did much better than I’d hoped, actually. I expected I’d have to step in, but no. They’re quite the effective little team. Though there was one oddity.’_

“Mmm.” A thin smile touched Precia’s lips. “They are blossoming well, yes. The oddity?”

 _‘The Breaker responded to the trap. It’s stronger than any one of them, but the four of them combined were overwhelming it. It began some sort of large-scale working; possibly a bombardment spell, but it was interrupted before it could fire it. A masked figure of some sort – I have no idea where they came from, I was at the wrong angle to see their line of approach. They attack with a shooting spell before entering melee, and the Breaker drove them off quickly.’_ Linith pawed at the bed covers pensively. _‘That alone was strange – there shouldn’t be many other mages operating this far out. But then when the girls took advantage of the Breaker’s distraction to gain some distance and launch bombardment spells, another mage teleported in and stopped them.’_

Precia raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Teleported in? A teleport that rapid, into a combat zone? And magic capable of stopping two bombardment spells? Are you certain?”

_‘As sure as I can be. It was definitely an inbound teleport, though I think it was short-range. Possibly from within the barrier – I am afraid that the tracking spells were optimised for escapees, not entrance. Still, the speed and precision was... alarming, to say the least. And they had a shield up less than a second after arriving. It was weakened by the bombardment, but it still held; we’re looking at a powerful mage here. I would normally conclude that the Book’s master is someone with a pre-existing powerbase, but...’_

Linith looked up, a low rasp of concern in the back of her throat. _‘I managed to trace the teleport as the Breaker left, this time. Imprecisely, but it was enough to get the origin planet, and I’m almost certain she was retreating home. The girls did their work well; she was in more of a hurry than the other two, so she took less care than she might have.’_

“And where did the trace go?” asked Precia, eyes narrowed impatiently. She could tell when her familiar was dancing around an issue. Something had Linith worried.

 _‘... Earth,’_ Linith admitted, after a moment’s hesitation. _‘It led to Earth. They may have a base there, or the Breaker may wait for several hours before relocating as a safety protocol. But I have been looking for departure ripples and seen nothing yet.’_ She lowered her head sadly. _‘Whoever this master is... we have to consider the possibility that they’re a native like Nanoha.’_

Dead silence. Precia’s eyes flickered closed as she thought rapidly. After a moment’s intense thought, they snapped open again.

“Do not tell the girls about this. Any of them. We cannot be certain that the master is a 97er mage yet, and there is no reason to worry them unnecessarily. We already knew that they were gathering on Earth; it makes sense for them to set up their base there, where they can hide among the natives and cripple potential TSAB retaliation. The ally is another point in favour of a non-UA-97 origin, though it may have been one of the Wolkenritter themselves...” She broke off and considered briefly. “... or perhaps not. From what records show, they rarely hide their appearances unless ordered, and none of them quite fit... perhaps the Wraith or the Hound? Hmm.”

She sighed. “But I agree that it is a possibility. Probability alone... UA-97 has the largest population in this region by far. If there are any other mages of Nanoha’s calibre there, they would make a prime host for the Book to latch onto. Not certain, but definitely possible. Probable, even.”

She pursed her lips. “Still, I suppose it makes our plan somewhat easier if it does turn out to be the case. Very well. We know of three attacks in the vicinity of Nanoha’s home, which implies that they have some presence in the area. Begin surveying the city, see if you can find any traces of their activity there.”

 _‘Yes, mistress,’_ Linith said, slipping off the bed and resuming human form. She tilted her head, her expression calm, as if she were merely discussing the weather on the world she had just left. “And if the master is found?”

Another silence. This one was short and ominous.

“Do as we discussed. Resolve the matter quickly and quietly.”

Linith smiled without warmth, and bobbed a curtsy.

“As you wish, mistress. I will be an exemplar of discretion.”

...

Vita felt a wry sense of déjà vu as she appeared above the Yagami household and floated down to land on the roof, where her fellow knights awaited her. It hadn’t been that long since the last evening she had landed here, injured and with news of a new enemy.

This time, however, there were two differences. Firstly, she was rather less injured. And secondly, she was smirking.

“It worked,” she reported as soon as she set down. “They were waiting for me. Two of them. One was definitely the same girl – different colour spells, but everything else matches. The other was a new element – not the same one that hit me from surprise, they were nowhere near that ruthless. Probably another young girl, powerful and skilled. A close-combatant, though she was using Mid-style. More heavily Belkan-weighted than normal; Zafira will want to study it.”

Signum nodded critically, sitting casually on the ridge of the roof. It was still early evening, but none of them were worried about being seen. Shamal’s wards would keep them from being seen, just as they hid the house from more advanced forms of detection. And up here, there was no chance of Hayate interrupting them. “So we’re looking at three opponents, at least,” she said.

“Four or five,” corrected Vita. “They both have familiars. The new one was defending with a different colour of magic than she was using to attack. The first girl’s longer-range, her familiar jumped out at me when I tried to get close – a big cat. An illusionist, too, she was cloaking the pair of them.” A faintly wistful grin crossed her face. “It reminded me of the Schattenritter. It’s been a while since I’ve faced that style. But it wasn’t enough, I nearly had them.”

Zafira raised an eyebrow. “Nearly? What happened?”

Vita frowned, twirling Graf Eisen, and opened a window to display what had happened. The red triangle spreading across the sky earned her three sharp looks, but any comments were averted as the masked figure blurred in on the attack. The four Knights watched in critical silence as it pressed the attack until its arm was broken, then retreated. The bombardment spell briefly filled the screen, but broke against the second figure and its swirling shield.

The playback as the red light of a teleport spell began to shine, and Vita huffed. “The first one went straight for the Book. It didn’t care about me, or even itself, it was completely focused on this.” She rapped on the book strapped to her hip. “Speaking of which, where’s the- ah, thanks.” She took the faintly glowing tome from Shamal and held her simulacra up to it, allowing the collected mana to flow into the true Book. “Only a few pages from animals this time, but I know how they fight now. I can get them next time.”

“By resorting to another spell of that scale?” Shamal said. “They pushed you further than you’re letting on, if you were ready to use that much force. Himmelhammer could have killed them.”

Vita scowled. “Give me some credit,” she snapped. “They had Barrier Jackets up, and I was going to pull the blow. They’d have been hurt, probably knocked out, but not killed. And I’d have caught them both before they hit the ground.”

“You’d also have exhausted yourself,” said Signum sharply. “Next time you’re taking one of us. I don’t care whether or not you can handle them by yourself; we’re not taking the risk. Two of us can handle them without overexerting ourselves or attracting attention.” She returned her gaze to the playback, eyes narrowed. “I’m more interested in these new mages. Are you sure the one that attacked you wasn’t the same one as last time?”

Vita pursed her lips. “It... could have been, I suppose,” she hazarded. “They were heavily disguised, so I can’t rule it out. But there were too many differences for it to be likely. Last time the attack was lethal, and focused mostly on getting the girl out. This one barely attacked me at all, and I’m not sure it even noticed the girls. It was casting in a different style, too. And the second one outright defended me. I think we’ve got two new elements here.” Her lips twitched into a sneer. “I don’t like it, this mucking about with helmets and masks. Nobody fights with any honour nowadays.”

“Honour or not, we will fight them.” Signum rose to her feet with a soft huff. “From now on, solo collection runs are off. We go out in pairs or not at all.”

“That may be harder to explain to Hayate,” Shamal pointed out, rising with her and heading towards the hatch down into the house.

“Explaining why one of us has gone missing would be harder,” Zafira countered. He stretched and shifted shape, taking his canine form. _‘I agree with Signum,’_ he continued. _‘Paired collection is safer.’_ He looked up at Shamal. _‘You can take me for a walk later this evening. If this new element attacks again, the two of us will be more than enough to find out who they are. And if they don’t... well, we can still put the time to good use.’_

...

A stream of information flowed to and from the Asura as it moved with purpose through the Dimensional Sea, circling in progressively wider orbits around UA-97. The bridge was a hive of activity, coordinating the activities of a dozen sensor teams even as it tried to track down the missing _Ravi_.

Chrono sighed and hooked his thumbs into his pockets. “This is pointless,” he grumbled. “It’s been three weeks, and if they have the engine powered down we’ll never find them. And I have my doubts on the sensor network, though at least that’s a step in the right direction. But being cooped up on the ship like this is solving nothing.”

“Oh? Are you jealous of Lanster’s squad, then?” asked Amy, a teasing tone to her voice as she turned from her console to glance at him.

A tone which went entirely unnoticed. “Not at all,” Chrono said stiffly. “They’re on guard duty. It’s as dull as this, and scarcely more effective.”

“Dull, maybe,” Amy sighed, “but at least they’re getting proper food and fresh air. I wouldn’t mind being down there.” She pouted. “It’s been too long since my last ground leave.”

“Well, I’ll be checking on them sometime tomorrow. I’ll ask them to relay you a heroic report of their endeavours,” he said dryly. “Regardless, we _should_ be taking more pro-active action to hunt them down, calling in more forces. Or at the very _least_ a few elite teams, something like the force we used last time. All we’ve got at the moment is the _Asura._ ”

“Hey!” snapped Amy, glowering. “Don’t insult her! She’s just been refitted! With an Arc-En-Ciel, no less – she’ll be more than enough for this job. And has she ever let us down?”

Chrono favoured her with a flat look. “Need I remind you,” he growled, “that the last time a single ship went up against the Book of Darkness in its activated state, it was lost along with all hands and...”

“No. You need not.”

Chrono and Amy – the latter with a slightly guilty look from her faux pas – started as Lindy entered the argument. Neither had even seen the Flotilla Admiral arrive. “We still don’t know for sure that we’re dealing with the Book, Chrono. And even if we are, more feet on the ground would only feed it more power.”

“Then call in a few more elite teams!” he snapped. “Bring in concentrated force, assets that can fight them in the field and prevent them from completing the thing at all! Trying to do this with nothing but our current forces is...”

Lindy _glared_ at him, and his mouth snapped shut. Amy, standing close enough to him that she caught the edge of the glare, whimpered slightly and edged backwards.

Sighing, the older woman pinched the bridge of her nose and breathed out. She looked very old all of a sudden, and very tired. “You’re right that we’re too weak here,” she acknowledged wearily. “I’ve asked for more teams, but high command can’t spare them at the moment. There’s a hylagea epidemic spreading just North-Bluewards of the core worlds. It’s already spread across several worlds and Banaeu has declared war on Mistridge, calling it microbiological terrorism. They’re having to pull in almost everything they’ve got to keep it contained, which leaves us spread thin everywhere else, so we’ve got more raiding on our border worlds. And _that’s_ stirring up trouble with a few of the anti-Bureau groups who are saying we’re failing to do our jobs... I can’t justify pulling troops all the way out to a backwater like this when we don’t even have proof we’re facing more than a few imitators.”

“But...”

“ _Chrono_ ,” Lindy cut him off forcefully. “You are a talented mage, and a good Enforcer. I need you on this case. And that means you need to get yourself _under control_ and stop letting your emotions cloud your judgement. Can I rely on you to act rationally, whether or not it turns out to be the Book, or do I need to reassign you?”

The look Chrono shot her was raw and betrayed, but it met solid steel. There was absolutely no hesitation in Lindy’s expression, nor any room for doubt that she would follow through with her threat. They locked gazes for a long, tense moment, and Chrono was the one to break the standoff by looking down.

“My apologies, Admiral,” he said stiffly. “I... will endeavour to control myself better in future. This won’t happen again.”

“Good. Because if it does, there will be no second warning. As you were, Enforcer Harlaown, Lieutenant Limietta. I’m sure you have work to do.”

“She looks tired,” murmured Amy as Lindy moved off to another bank of monitors, consulting with two of the bridge staff attending them. Chrono nodded.

“She is. This has her worried. And she agrees with my suspicions, even if she can’t say it without evidence.” He sighed. “She’s right, though. About the reinforcements and the Book. Come on, we should get back to the sensor teams, they’ll be...”

He was cut off as an alarm blared; one of the distress calls that the teams setting up sensor stations had been issued with.

“Sensor Team Seven under attack!” came a panicking voice over the line. “Single hostile! They went straight for the scanning equipment we were trying to set up, Bennet and Calhew are down! I can’t...”

The shrieks and cracks of shooting magic echoed for a moment, and the voice came back on again. “They’re... down, I think. Scanning equipment is destroyed, though, and I count three... no, four of us who aren’t moving. We need a medic team, it looks like... wait, what the... hey! It’s not...”

Another crack sounded, much louder and closer than the last. Then the dull _woomph_ of an explosion drowned out the rest of what the man was saying, and the line dissolved into static.

The bridge stood frozen for a moment before bursting into a flurry of activity. Chrono ignored the shouts and relayed information from the bridge crew in favour of setting off at a dead run for the teleport booth. “Amy!” he yelled over his shoulder. “Contact the monitoring team! Tell them I won’t be able to check on them, and make sure they have all their gear in passive mode! This is an attack on our eyes and ears; they’ll home in on any active scanning they detect!”

“Got it! You’re going to help?” Amy was already setting up the teleport, fingers blurring over the keys as the booth warmed up.

“If I go now, there’s a chance I might be able to catch up with the attacker!” Skidding to a halt and turning to catch Lindy’s eye, Chrono stayed put just long enough to catch her affirmative nod, before diving into the teleport chamber and vanishing in a flash of blue.

...

“I’m bored!”

The cry which echoed through the cramped quarters was not entirely unsurprising to Nanoha, all things considered. She wanted a bath, but she couldn’t have one. She’d need to have a shower instead, to wash off the sweat from the battle.

“I’m bored and I’m cold and I’m not getting out of bed until something interesting happens!”

Nanoha poked her head into the room where Alicia slept. Fate was sitting by the bed, trying to coax her little sister into emerging. This was proving harder than might be expected.

“Come on,” Fate said. “We can tell you what we did.”

“Only if I get to stay in here, in the warm!”

“Do you... uh...” Fate tried to pull at the covers.

“No!” protested Alicia, head poking out. “You can’t take it away! You can’t!”

“Why not?” Fate asked.

“Because I’m the blanket snake, duh! Don’t take me from my natural habitat! You know what happens if you take me from my natural habitat in this cold?”

“What?” Nanoha asked, humouring her. Alicia shot her a dramatic look, her voice dropping into an ominous register for a moment.

“I _die._ ”

“Uh,” Nanoha said intelligently.

“Blanket snakes are cold blooded animals,” Alicia explained, wriggling in deeper. “If you take a blanket snake away from its natural blanket home, it freezes into a block of ice and then shatters into a million billion pieces. So that’s why I have to stay in bed until something more interesting happens and I can stop being the blanket snake. Or it gets warmer on this boring cold ship!”

 _‘There’s not really a thing as a blanket snake?’_ Nanoha sent to Fate, feeling slightly worried.

 _‘Apart from Alicia, no,’_ Fate replied. “We could read a story together?” she suggested to her little sister.

“Only if we can do it in the workshop,” the blanket snake replied in a muffled tone of voice. “They locked me out again so I can’t look at the pretty tools any more. It’s not fair! I want to be home and back at school with my friends!” Its head emerged. “Unless we get to go to your home instead, Nanoha!” it declared enthusiastically.

“I don’t think we’d be allowed to do that,” Fate said, frowning.

“But I want to meet Nanoha’s family,” Alicia complained. “And I’m bored and cold and _bleargh_!”

“You’re sick?” Fate asked.

“No! I’m _bleargh._ ”

Nanoha tilted her head. The lights above flickered for a moment, and she heard the noise of the vessel shift fractionally. “How about we go play a game down in the hold? We could ask Precia if that would be okay?” she said.

The blanket snake considered it, and emerged, becoming Alicia Testarossa again. “Fine,” she said, her hair tousled. “But only if we ask Mama if we can go to visit Nanoha’s family at the same time!”

When they got to Precia’s room, however, they found Linith at the door. “She’s half-asleep at the moment,” the woman said. “I’m afraid it’ll have to wait.”

“But I want to talk to her!” Alicia said, pouting.

“We want to see if we can play a game down in the hold,” Nanoha said quickly. Permission from Linith was _basically_ permission from Precia, right?

“The captain said that people can go in the empty hold,” Linith said, “so that’s probably fine. But keep out of the sealed one.”

Fate brushed her hand against Nanoha’s. _‘Go ahead,’_ she sent. _‘I just need to talk to Linith.’_

Nanoha took in her friend’s face. Fate was pale, nervous, worried, and suddenly looked as if she had missed a night’s sleep. _‘Do you need...’_

“ _I’ll be fine,_ ” Fate mentally whispered. _‘Go on.’_

The hold was an echoing, bare place, with paint-streaked metal. It smelt of oil and a hint of ozone. 

“All right!” Alicia declared, putting her hands on her hips. “This is a _brand new_ game I’ve invented! I call it Pretty Barrierball! It’s like Barrierball, but prettier!”

Nanoha was aware of Barrierball, because it was one of Alicia’s previous inventions. The current form resembled tennis played without a net where you hit the ball with a barrier – mostly because Nanoha had helped her ‘refine’ the rules to stop her changing them every time they played. But, “How is it pretty?” she asked.

Alicia grinned. “Oh, that’s simple! See, I modified the ball spell so every time you hit it, it changes to a random colour! And you have to match the colour with your barrier! Or else it’s a foul and you lose!”

“Hmm,” Nanoha said. That was certainly less radical than some of the other games Alicia had invented – she still shuddered at the memory of Explosive Fast Barrierball, which had been banned by Linith after the first time they had been caught playing it. Which had also been the first time they’d tried playing it. She sent up a fervent prayer that this one would be less... loud. “Okay, so...”

“Uh uh uh!” The little girl looked triumphant. “See, the different about Pretty Barrierball is that it wouldn’t be very pretty if there was only one ball, would it? It’d be all boring and one coloured! And that’d be dull! So now you’re allowed to make a new ball each time you hit the ball. And... and you’re also allowed to use more than one barrier, as long as it stays back far enough and... and you can use training shots to hit the balls too, but if you hit a ball with a training shot, it pops! I put that in the spell too! And if there are no balls left at any time, you both lose!”

Nanoha blinked. She thought she understood that, but she wasn’t sure. Still, it sounded hard. She would have to be managing both barriers and training shots, tracking several objects in three dimensions... honestly, it felt more like training than just a game.

She perked up. When she put it like that...

She _had_ noticed that a lot of Dimensional Space games seemed to be descended from warfare. Mind you, that was also true of Earth games. After all, she considered, what was baseball but hitting things really hard with blunt objects? And at least Dimensional Space games were more fun to watch. And play. It also helped that she was good at them, unlike... well, pretty much any Earth game you cared to mention. Stupid useless volleyball.

This sounded actually quite a lot of fun, she thought, staring at the beaming little girl. “Let me see that ball spell,” she said, smiling.

...

It took Fate almost five minutes to argue her way past Linith, but the familiar eventually conceded to let her in, claiming other business of her own. Precia didn’t seem surprised to see her. She had propped herself up on her elbows, but hadn’t got out of bed yet. The reason became uncomfortably clear as she extended a hand towards Fate.

“Help me up, would you?” she asked. “I need to speak to Hektor about something.”

Her hand was cool to the touch. Fate didn’t dare pull it, and moved closer instead, sliding an arm around Precia’s waist and helping her get to her feet. She waited while Precia donned a Jacket and lifted her Device from its place on the table, shifting it into the thin bracelet its rest form resembled. That done, they proceeded out into the corridor and up towards the bridge.

Her mother was dressing much more... well, she was showing much less flesh, and as Fate all-but carried her mother, she could feel why. If she had dressed as she used to, she couldn’t have hidden how bone-thin she was. She pushed that thought to the back of her mind and concentrated on helping Precia navigate the stairs.

“Today is... something of a bad day,” Precia said, out of nowhere. Fate looked at her in surprise, and Precia’s mouth curved into a wry smile. “You were worrying. I could tell. Don’t fret so, Fate. Now that Linith is back, my health will...” she paused, considering, “... I will be far more comfortable than I was. I have at least a few more months in me, as long as I don't have to throw out any big spells.” She smiled sadly. “Don't worry about me, Fate. And don't let Alicia know.”

“I know,” Fate managed in a small voice. “I have to be strong for her.”

The hand gripping her shoulder for support gave her a slight squeeze. She noticed with some surprise that her eyes were dry, and that she hadn’t needed to bite back any sobs. It had been getting... not easier, never easier, but the six months of adjusting to this had turned it into something she could handle. It was as if she’d grieved already, and the grieving had turned the ball of hot, bitter pain into a cold hollow somewhere deep inside her.

She wasn’t foolish enough to think it would stay that way. When her mother actually... when it actually _happened_ , she was sure it would boil afresh, hot and cold and sharp and raw and agonising. But even so, she felt that she could handle it, now. She knew what grief felt like, she’d had a glimpse at the pain and loss that would come. She would stand firm. She would be strong.

Just as Mother trusted her to be.

“Here we are.”

Fate blinked, pulled back to the present. They were just outside the bridge. “Oh... um, do you want me to come in with you?” she asked, nervously. Precia shook her head.

“I will be fine on my own, child. Linith told me that Alicia and Nanoha are playing in the cargo hold? Why don’t you go and join them?”

“But... I can help you, if you get tired or...”

“Fate.” The girl quietened instantly as a slender finger covered her lips. “I will need you months from now, to be responsible, mature, dedicated.” She paused, allowing that to sink in and taking a few slow breaths before continuing. “At the moment, though, I am here and we are safe. You should be free to relax for a time. Working and worrying yourself into the ground accomplishes nothing. .Do something you enjoy.”

“But...” Fate protested, but she trailed off, unable to object.

“Go,” Precia said softly. “Go play with Alicia.”

“But...” Fate said, trying to find the words. “I should... I need to be here for you.”

“She’s happy when her sister plays with her,” Precia said, in a croak. “She should matter more to you now than I do. She has her entire life, her precious life, ahead of her. If,” she coughed, “if you can do that for me, Fate... it’s not fair on you, I know. I should not have to ask you to be her mother as well as her sister.”

Fate stilled. Then her head rose, and she looked Precia in the eye.

“You don’t,” she said with quiet conviction. “I would look after her anyway. I’ll always protect her. Always.”

Precia smiled at her. Fate knew her mother was proud of her, despite the sadness of that expression. She rested a hand on Fate’s head for a moment, then gave her a gentle nudge back down the corridor.

“I know you will,” she murmured. “Now, go and join them. And do make sure that they don’t try to play that explosive barrier-ball game again, would you? I would prefer not to have to deal with that again.”

...

It was odd, Yuuno pondered, how memories of a place could seem so fresh. It had been six months since he had set foot in Uminari City, and yet it felt as though he’d last walked along its streets only yesterday. The air was colder now; winter starting to set in, but the ambient noise of the city and the flare of the sodium streetlamps were just the same as they’d been on evening patrols with Nanoha, looking for Jewel Seeds. Once he had found the small portion of the city he knew, his feet guided him unerringly along familiar pavements and the landmarks that dotted them, towards the centre of his mental map.

The Takamachi residence.

“Okay, hold on here a moment.” Tiida was the leader of their three-person team, and Heidi halted alongside him as they drew to a stop a mere block away from the house. This late in the evening, in a residential district away from the shops and city centre, the streets were bare of people. Standing next to the tall officer-cadet and the even taller markswoman, Yuuno felt both exposed and undersized; the same feeling he had about more or less everything in his ferret form.

“Okay, quick review before we go in,” continued Tiida. “Now that we’re here. Heidi, they haven’t seen you before, so you do the talking. I’ll stay back and provide backup from... hmm.” He looked around, evaluating potential spots. “I think... yes, the bus shelter over there. If trouble breaks out, don’t hesitate to yell for me, but try to keep active magic down to a minimum. We don’t want to attract the attention of whatever took out that sensor team.”

“Of course, sir,” drawled Heidi. “I’ll keep that in mind for when they bake a cake at us, or try to hit us with a stick.”

Yuuno winced. “Um...”

“Listen,” Tiida shot back, frowning, “I realise they’re civilians, but the mother at the very least is magically gifted. Harlaown was wary of her, that’s more than enough reason for us to be. And we _know_ there are hostile mages operating in the area, so we’re going to take precautions even for safe jobs. All you have to do is go in, be polite, warn them of the potential danger and see if they’ve noticed anything. And warn them not to use any active magic. I’d do it myself if there wasn’t a chance of her recognising me from our last mission here.” He grimaced. “I wish we weren’t split up like this. Something’s attacking the sensor teams on other worlds, and it might be... bad.”

“You’re just using that trip to the café as an excuse to get out of talking to them now. And we don’t know what’s happening out there. No one tells us anything,” Heidi grumbled under her breath, but she bowed her head to his argument nonetheless. Tiida rolled his eyes at her and stepped away towards the bus shelter. He knew her enough to know that she complained when she was worried, and the terse warnings and orders to be on the highest alert which had come from Admiral Harlaown were enough to have anyone concerned. He just wished that Heidi would find a more productive way of channelling her worry.

“Um, Lieutenant?” Yuuno repeated, louder. Tiida stopped and looked back at him inquisitively, and he hastily blurted out what was on his mind. “Speaking of, um, being recognised... I’m... not sure I should be here. Last time the Takamachis saw me, they... sort of said they didn’t want to ever see me again.” He looked down glumly. “I’m not surprised, really. But with that in mind, I don’t really think I should go in to talk to them.”

Tiida looked at him thoughtfully for a few moments, lips pursed. “Hmm. That’s true,” he allowed. “But they do need to be warned, and even though Heidi will be doing most of the talking, I’m not comfortable having her do it alone. I think we’ll risk it.”

Yuuno sighed, but didn’t argue further as he and Heidi proceeded across the road and up the path to the Takamachi’s front door. Heidi knocked sharply, and Yuuno took a deep breath, steeling himself.

Faint footsteps sounded from within, and the door was jerked open by a young woman with long brown hair bound back in a braided ponytail. Her jogging bottoms and jumper were crumpled and creased from exercise, and she blinked blearily at the pair in confusion.

“... hello?”

“Um, hi, Miyuki.” Yuuno tried not to squirm. He remembered her squealing over how cute his ferret form was, and wasn’t entirely sure how well she would take the revelation that he was human. Nanoha certainly hadn’t reacted positively. “Could you get your parents? There’s something they need to know.”

Tired and confused the girl back have been, but she was far from stupid. She glanced at the young boy and his uniformed companion, then back again. Her expression cleared in recognition, then shifted into a worried frown.

“Yeah, I’ll... just go get them. Hang on a minute.”

She vanished into the house for a few minutes, and returned with Shiro and Momoko. Neither of them looked happy, and Shiro in particular had his features set in the stony mask that Yuuno remembered from his last visit.

“Last time I spoke to your people, I said I’d appreciate never having to do so again,” he said bluntly. His eyes were on Yuuno as he said it, and the young ferret-changeling winced at the reminder.

“You did, yes,” Heidi replied. “And we’d normally be happy to let you be, but a situation has come up that may put you at risk, so I’m here to fill you in on it. My name is Heidi Zwischenfall. I’m here from the Time-Space Administration Bureau with a warning. We believe there is a Harvester-type Lost Logia, or a group emulating one, operating in this area. Something that drains magic and Linker Cores – we’ve already found evidence of draining schemes on several nearby worlds. All of you possess active magical talent, so it’s possible that you could be targeted by the same group or Logia that’s been attacking others.”

Miyuki shifted back slightly, her eyes flickering between her parents; first to her mother and then to her father. Momoko paled, and Shiro’s face somehow became even more of a blank wall than it had been. He glanced at his wife, and a rapid exchange of subtle expressions and silent communication passed between them. Yuuno couldn’t catch most of it, but guessed from a raised eyebrow that Shiro was asking some sort of question.

 _‘Telepathy,’_ Heidi sent. _‘They’re debating whether to tell us about something, though they haven’t mentioned exactly what. Still, it looks like they’ve already noticed something’s up.’_ She paused. _‘Gosh, they’re sloppy at this.’_

Yuuno struggled not to react, and barely kept his expression neutral. _‘You can listen in on their telepathy?’_ he asked. _‘Wait, don’t do that! It’s unethical!’_

_‘To the first, yes, I took an optional module on it in cadet training. And to the second, if they’re going to broadcast in the clear, it’s their own fault. Hang on, they’ve decided to talk to us.’_

_‘But...’_ began Yuuno heatedly, and then quickly shut up and tried to look innocent as Momoko and Shiro turned back to them. Shiro didn’t look happy, but grudgingly nodded to them. “I may not like you, but I won’t have you killed through lack of information,” he said brusquely. “You had better come in. This isn’t a conversation to have on a doorstep.”

A few minutes later, sat on a sofa he was more familiar with being curled up on the arm of, Yuuno squeezed his eyes shut and massaged his temples. “This is... urgh, terrible. If they’re already this far out...” He ground his teeth together in frustration, listening to the tick of the clock. “You’re sure you didn’t see anything?”

He wasn’t sure, but Momoko’s eyes seemed to flicker for a moment towards her husband. “Suzuka caught a glimpse of a tall man, broad-shouldered, muscular,” she said reluctantly. “Arisa says that the one that attacked her was a girl with red hair and a red dress. I don’t really remember anything about mine, I never saw them.”

“Did either of them have weapons?” Heidi asked. “A sword, or bladed weapon of some kind? A mace or hammer?”

Momoko thought for a moment, and nodded. “The girl who attacked Arisa had a hammer, yes.” She hesitated, and for a moment it looked like she was about to say more. She seemed to reach some sort of internal decision, though Yuuno couldn’t guess as to what it was, and shook her head. “The man didn’t have any weapons, though. None that Suzuka saw, at least, and I doubt asking her about it would get you much more information. She doesn’t remember much more than I do.”

“Hmm. When was all of this?” Heidi’s eyes were closed, and Yuuno was close enough to sense the encrypted chatter of rapid telepathy passing back and forth between her and Tiida. “Have there been any other hospitalisations in the nearby area recently?”

“One or two others beyond Momoko and the girls,” Shiro put in. “I looked into it when... well, the first attack was just unfortunate, but when Suzuka came down with the same symptoms, we became suspicious.” His voice was curt and clipped. “Magic seemed likely, from our previous experiences with it and Momoko’s description of how she’d been drained. That was a little less than a month ago.”

Heidi’s eyes snapped open at that. “You could tell you’d been drained? How? You would need magical training for that, I’d have thought.”

Momoko’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Yuuno _did_ leave me with his Storage Device. I’ve been practicing.”

Heidi shot him a look of half-surprise, half-reprimand. He ignored it, though, focused on Momoko. “I’m just sorry I couldn’t have been here myself,” he offered back. “I owe Na- _her_ enough that I should have been here to help protect you.” He looked down. “That’s... sort of why I’m here now, actually. To try and... make amends, I suppose.”

Shiro’s expression softened a little, and Momoko smiled sadly. “Well, I’m sure she’d forgive you if she could talk to you,” she said. Sorrow and sympathy warred on her face for a moment, and Yuuno again got the impression that she wanted to say more. But she held her tongue, and stood up instead, changing the subject quickly. “Anyway, I’m not sure there’s anything else we can help you with – I’ve told you everything I can think of. Are there any other questions you had?”

“I have one,” Shiro cut in suddenly. “Are we in any danger of being attacked again?”

Heidi hesitated. “Well... that depends on the exact identity of your attackers. If it’s what we think it is, then you should be safe; the Logia can’t drain someone more than once. But it’s possible it’s an imitator group – some of our people have been attacked during the search in ways that don’t correlate with the known characteristics of the Wolkenritter. If that’s the case you would be best served by minimising your magic use to avoid detection, and...”

_‘Yuuno?’_

Yuuno nearly jumped out of his skin. Momoko wasn’t looking at him, and her telepathy was quiet – almost a whisper, barely noticeable even to him. _‘Y-yes?’_ he stammered.

_‘I lied.’_

He blinked at her, confused. Then hurriedly looked away, towards Heidi, who was still talking. If Momoko didn’t want it known she was talking to him, he assumed she had a good reason for it.

 _‘I saw my attacker,’_ she continued. _‘The... she was a sword-user. Like your friend mentioned. She used fire. I tried to fight her, but she... I didn’t want my family trying to fight her in revenge. So I lied. But I can’t let you go into this without a warning. She has pink hair, and she’s... she’s terrifyingly strong.’_

 _‘A sword... and a fire affinity,’_ Yuuno choked out. His throat felt horribly dry, and there was a terrible lump in his stomach. He knew that description. He knew it all too well. _‘Was she... did she have anything else? Any other... objects, or... anything else that seemed magical, on her?’_

Momoko was silent. Shiro asked another question in the distance, which Heidi replied to, but he didn’t register the words from either. She was silent for so long that for a moment he thought she wasn’t going to reply at all.

Then, for the first time since she’d started the conversation, she glanced up and looked him straight in the eye.

 _‘Yes,’_ she said grimly. _‘Just one. It was what she used to... to drain me.’_

Yuuno closed his eyes and sent a silent prayer to the Kaisers. _‘What was it?’_

_‘A book. A glowing book, with a golden cross on the cover.’_

...

The next morning, a knock came early at the door to one of the passenger cabins on the ship that Precia had hired. It opened a moment later, and Linith stepped in with a bulging pair of plastic bags and a cheerful announcement.

“Girls, I have a job for you.”

Nanoha and Fate looked up eagerly, as did their familiars. The quartet were sprawled out on the floor of the room they shared, the girls and Vesta using Arf as a pillow as was their habit. Alicia was absent, still asleep in the next room over. From the looks of things, they had been playing some sort of game on their Devices, but the windows vanished at Linith’s entrance and they hung on her next words.

“Another fight with the Breaker?” Nanoha asked. “Because I’m pretty sure I’ve had a few ideas on how to wear her down faster. And last night, me and Vesta were talking about what we’d do if those masked guys showed up again, and we think we’ve...”

She trailed off as Linith shook her head, hefting the bag she was carrying. “No, not a combat job, I’m afraid,” she said. “Something a little more... covert.” Reaching into the pocket of her overcoat, she drew out four sleek black rods, which shone glossy and smooth in the light. “Do you know what these are?”

Four blank looks met her raised eyebrow, and she nodded amicably. “They’re MERA units. Precia managed to obtain them from Schzenais shortly before leaving to join us here.”

Nanoha’s expression remained blank, as did Vesta’s, but Fate and Arf sucked in a quick breath. Linith nodded to her with a smile. “Yes, I thought you’d get it quickly.” She looked back to Nanoha. “In essence, they’re sensors that can detect mana being used, as well as traces that are left over in places it’s been used. They’re also sensitive enough to pick up very, very faint mana residue. We know the Wolkenritter have attacked three targets in Uminari City, but we don’t know where their base of operations is, or whether they’ve attacked any others. If you synchronise these with your Devices and wander around the city for a few days, we should be able to get a rough picture of whether there’s been any recent mana usage anywhere around town.”

She twirled the black rods between her fingers. “Normally they’re used to find the details of the residue, but I think we can assume that the Wolkenritter are going to have purged any useful information from their battlegrounds. However, since this planet has very few native magic-users, they can’t hide the fact that magic _was_ used, only scramble the details. And we don’t need the details – if we know where and roughly when they were using magic, we might be able to track them down before they hurt anyone else.”

She let that sink in for a moment, and then put down the bag. “Now, I have some clothes here for you. Put them on, teleport down to the city after breakfast and you can make an early start of it. I’d recommend beginning your search around where the three attacks we know of took place.” She pursed her lips. “See if you can pick up a few newspapers as well. Look for anything about... oh, I don’t know, missing persons, illness characterised by sudden bouts of weakness, strange lights in the sky, that sort of thing. It’s not likely to pan out, but it’s worth a try.”

“Shouldn’t we use disguises?” queried Arf. “I mean, we’ve been gone a while, but Nanoha’s still a missing person, and the Breaker at least has seen her face.”

“It would be safer if you could, yes,” sighed Linith. “Unfortunately, the sensors are _very_ sensitive. An active illusion spell would interfere with the readings. Even a Jacket would, actually, which is why I bought you the clothes to go down in. They all have hoods, so you’ll at least be able to conceal your faces to some extent.”

“So we just take these around town?” asked Fate. “We don’t need to do anything with them, operate them at all?”

“No, no input needed,” Linith assured her. “They’ll stream all the data they collect to your Devices, and we can have a look at it when you get back.” She handed the bags over and turned around politely as the girls began to change.

After so many months wearing the condensed mana and magical fields of Jacket-clothing, it felt strange for Nanoha to struggle into the jeans and hooded top. The weight of the fabric on her shoulders was unfamiliar in contrast to the light pressure and smooth texture of mana-generated material.

When had she changed so, that she now found her birthplace as unfamiliar as it was nostalgic? When had the new things in her life started to outnumber the old?

“Liniiiiiith! I can’t wear _these!_ They’re unfashionable!”

Nanoha’s mouth twitched, and with a fond sigh she turned to help Linith deal with her offended familiar. Here, at least, was one new element in her life that she wouldn’t give up for the world. Even if she _was_ a royal pain at times.

“You’re a cat like me! How could you assemble this travesty of an outfit? And to think I trusted you!”

...

Yuuno sighed. He was strolling through the city, having offered to scout around for possible spots to set up extensions to their sensor network in order to get some time to himself. The room he’d been allocated in the apartment was small, and he shared it with Tiida and one of the men from the sensor team. Not the best place to get away from them for a while.

He didn’t resent them, exactly. But both teams were self-contained units, made up of people who knew each other of old. He was a vague acquaintance at best, and even when they made an effort to include him, he felt out of place.

He was used to being on his own, though. That was nothing new, after who knew how many archaeological digs where he was left mostly to himself by the supervisors. It was more peaceful out by himself, and he could think more clearly.

It was... surprisingly hard, being here. Back on UA-97. The talk with the Takamachis the evening before had been draining, of course, but it was more than that.

It hadn’t been so bad, back on Mid. He’d been able to bury himself in work, and avoid any reminders of what had happened. But here, in Nanoha’s homeland, the streets were thronged with people who shared her distinctive features and language. No matter where he looked, there was something that made him think of her, someone who he mistook for her just long enough to be disappointed when they turned their head or spoke. The reminders were everywhere; inescapable.

Like the advertisement for a manga series he vaguely remembered her shelves being full of.

Like the group of girls giggling together on a bench, in school uniforms – white dresses, the kind he had climbed up to sit on her shoulder.

Like the smell of chocolate wafting out of a cafe, a scent absent from Midchilda; sweeter and milkier and full of nostalgia.

Like the young girl slouching against a wall outside a newsagent, a few stray locks of auburn-brown hair escaping messily from the hood of her oversized jumper, a grey cat coiling around her ankles.

 _Nanoha_.

For a terrible, timeless moment, Yuuno’s heart stood still in his chest. The blood drained from his face, leaving him an unhealthy greyish-white, and he swayed as if physically struck. It _couldn’t_ be her, it was just another girl who looked somewhat similar... and yet the bored, rebellious posture was the one Nanoha had adopted whenever they’d had to cut training short for the day. Her hair was the precise shade he remembered it. And the cat...

“Nano...” he began, and then realised what he was doing and dived sideways into the shade of a building, startling an angry cry from a passer-by as he nearly ran into the man. Every muscle tensed as he peeked around the corner at the girl, his heart hammering in his chest.

Nothing. If it _was_... no, he couldn’t get his hopes up. Couldn’t let himself finish the thought, or he would... he didn’t know what he’d do, but it wouldn’t be useful. _Regardless_ of who it was, she hadn’t reacted to the mention of her name. They were probably too far away for... for even a cat’s hearing. If it was really...

... he had to be sure. He had to be _sure_ , not for the mission or the report he was already putting together in a combination of dread and desperate hope. If he left this alone, he’d be thinking about it for days; he had to assure himself it wasn’t. But how? She would... no, he couldn’t let himself get distracted by hoping. _If_ it was her, not only would she recognise him, the cat would warn her before he got close.

Okay. Okay, that just meant he had to check it without getting too close, then. Magic... would not be a good idea, there was too much chance she’d sense it. Carefully, he slid out his Device – sealed in its pen form at the moment, but that was all he would need. One picture would be enough to focus in and analyse her face. He just needed to get it at the right angle.

Peeling away from the wall, he jogged down the street a short distance to the crossing. The traffic obscured his view of the girl as he slunk over to the other side of the road, but he could see the bookstore easily. Falling into step with a group of chattering youths going back up towards his target, he held his Device at the ready. All he needed was one shot when he was parallel to her, and then image enhancement and analysis could do the rest. Just one shot...

... but she was gone. Panic gripped him for a moment – had he been seen? But no, there was a blue-and-brown hoodie disappearing into the store. It was fine. Everything was fine. He just had to wait for her to come out again. Then he’d know.

He shivered, leaning against a lamppost and huddling further into his jacket. What... what if it was her? He closed his eyes and saw, again, the flash of actinic light as the Garden of Time detonated; the cruiser-sized chunks of debris spinning end over end through the void and the hungry, empty rift that had consumed all that was left of it.

How could anything have survived that?

... and if she had, where had she _been?_ What had she been doing? Had Testarossa’s bridge to Alhazred worked after-

Liquid ice poured down his spine. His stomach turned to lead, and his face paled to a chalky grey pallor again as he finished the thought in horror. Kaisers, _Testarossa_. If Nanoha was here, was _she?_ If they’d come back from Imaginary Space, from _Alhazred_ , what might they have brought back with them? What might they have come back _for?_

It was almost enough for him to hope they _hadn’t_ survived – and that thought summoned the familiar twist of guilt, the confused ache that _she had left she hadn’t chosen him he’d poured out everything he could and it hadn’t been enough..._

Yuuno shook his head violently, forcing the distractions out. He was moping again, and that solved nothing. He had a task before him. Here was someone who might or might not be Nanoha. If it was her, the TSAB needed to know. Her _family_ needed to know. Therefore, he would find out.

She hadn’t come out yet. The cat was gone, too – into the store with her? Was that even allowed? Though Nanoha’s familiar had been a stealth-focused one, he’d had altogether too much first-hand experience of that. He scoured the inside of the bookshop, or what of it he could see through the door from across the street, but couldn’t locate the diminutive figure. Behind some stacks, probably. Or deeper inside the shop.

The initial rush of panic-fuelled adrenaline was wearing off now, and he was conscious of his heart pounding a mile a minute in his chest and the blood ringing in his ears. He was panting, though he hadn’t realised it until now; light, harsh breaths as if he were fighting for his life.

He checked the time – it had been five minutes since she’d gone in. It seemed longer. The smart thing to do, without a doubt, would be to keep waiting here until he came out. But the pounding need to know, to either be sure it was her or be disappointed as usual and get on with his life, drove him forward. He hesitantly crossed the street and, after peering as best he could through the door and finding no sign of her, slunk inside.

It was warmer in the bookstore, and the familiar smell of books and paper tugged a faint smile of nostalgia to his lips. He trailed an affectionate finger along the spines arrayed in the floor-to-ceiling bookcase as he slowly made his way down the length of the long, thin shop, cautiously checking each gap between the low shelves that were arranged in neat rows down the centre of the shop. Each wary glance yielded no young girl, no feline familiar, and eventually there were only two bookshelves left.

The final row was as empty of his target as all the others had been, and now only the space behind the last shelf remained; a taller bookshelf than the others, set in front of a bannister. A single step beside it led down to an open area – he could see a couple of armchairs and beanbags, and there were lower shelves set around it. The books that filled them haphazardly were larger and thinner, with eye-grabbing covers in brighter colours. The children’s section, presumably.

He gathered his courage, crossed his fingers and stepped around the shelf to see...

... a second entrance to the shop. Set in the children’s section, round a corner and out of sight of the first, he hadn’t noticed it in the length of his search through the shop. A tired mother tending to two rowdy toddlers gave him a quizzical look as he sat down with a hard thump on the step, staring at the open door that led out onto a bustling street full of people.

The girl, whoever she’d been, was nowhere in sight.

He had lost her again.

...

A quiet moment in the early afternoon found Signum in the Yagami living room, thinking hard. Shamal and Zafira were out on a mission, and she trusted their strength, but the foreign assailant still occupied her thoughts. She, more than any of the other Wolkenritter, was accustomed to following her opponent’s movements, and something about the way Vita’s attacker had moved and struck at the Book-simulacra spoke to her of something she had fought before. An old style, perhaps, still in use? She idly sorted through the hundreds of fighting styles she had faced, trying to place the distinctive movements. But it was futile. The déjà vu, such as it was, was no more than a nagging sense of familiarity. With nothing more than that and a streak of grey light to go on, the possible scope of sources was just too broad to narrow it down any further.

“Signum!”

The knight looked up, jerked out of her reverie, as Hayate wheeled into the room with a tray balanced on her lap. Two cups of tea sat on it, wobbling slightly as she moved, and Signum started to stand up to help.

“Don’t worry,” Hayate said cheerfully, “I’ve got them! Here.” Leaning forwards to place the tray safely on the table, she offered Signum a cup.

Signum half-stood again, uncomfortably. “Hayate, you don't need to be doing this,” she objected. “I should be doing this; I should be the one serving you.”

Hayate rolled her eyes at the older woman. “No, I don't need to do this. But I want to. I like making tea!” She wrinkled her nose. “And you always make it far too strong, anyway. Bleagh. Anyway, I came to ask you about something, so it makes sense that I should bring the tea. Unless you’re busy?”

“I can always spare time for you,” Signum smiled, accepting the teacup that Hayate was still insistently offering. Cradling it in her hands, she watched her young mistress as she began a long and somewhat rambling explanation of the films she had been watching with her friend, and how they were connected to something that Hayate danced around actually specifying, and how they had been doing research of some sort by watching them...

Her thoughts drifted a little as she listened with the practiced ear of a commander breaking down an amateur’s report for the useful content within. Chikaze Yoshida... yes, she was an interesting one. Hayate certainly seemed close to her – and she had dropped hints that she’d been a lot lonelier before meeting the younger girl. While Chikaze had a surprisingly powerful Linker Core for this magically-starved planet – not far below C-rank, if Signum was any judge – she was much more valuable to Hayate as a friend than as a source of power. Harvesting her would be a last resort, left only for the event of Hayate’s condition turning critical. And in the meantime, the training they could provide would reinforce her and make her more useful to the Book if such a regrettable circumstance came to pass.

Signum was broken out of her reverie – the second in as many minutes, she was letting her guard slip to dangerous levels today – by Hayate’s voice raising animatedly as she began her conclusion. Guiltily, she quickly reviewed the condensed version of the monologue she’d been building up out of habit. Yes, Hayate had been talking about... zombies?

“... so we thought really hard about it, and we’ve been working for ages, and we’ve come up with a list of plans you can use!” Hayate finished in a rush. Proudly; like a child presenting a school report for parental approval, she pressed the sheaf of paper into Signum’s hands. Blinking slowly, the knight scanned it.

 _Idea #7:_ she read at random, _Leave lots of rakes lying around so that the zombies step on them and hit them in the face (but be sure to warn the alive people not to step on them or they’ll be hurt!)_

Signum was almost a thousand years old, and even her clear memories stretched back more than a century. Over the course of her long existence, she had fought and led more wars that she could remember, slain more foes than she could count, and earned many sobriquets and titles; chief among them the General of the Raging Flame. Her skill on the battlefield was legendary, rivalled only by her brilliance as a strategist and commander. By dint of sheer experience, it was possible that she was among the greatest military tacticians alive. She drew on that experience now to evaluate, in minute detail, the plans laid out before her.

“Um,” she said.

Hayate kept looking up at her with those big blue eyes, waiting for an evaluation.

“Uh...” Signum flipped through a few more pages, her eyes alighting upon further pages written in the same careful, childish hand. Here was a list of zombie characteristics ( _Usually they’re slow, but sometimes they’re fast. Beware the fast ones! They’re really scary!_ ). Behind it, a rough sketch of something that, after examining it for a moment, Signum realised was some kind of scaled-up mousetrap that involved multiple sets of doors.

None of it gave her any idea how to deal with the hopeful nine-year old who was still staring up at her, now biting her lip nervously. Signum knew how to deal with battlefields, warfront strategy and people trying to kill her. Pre-teen girls, even after six months of exposure, were still something she had considerably less of a grasp on. She thought fast.

“I... am certainly impressed with the effort you’ve put into this,” she said – true enough, it _was_ impressive for a pair of children. A few of the comments were even fairly perceptive. “And your ideas are better than those of many masters we have served in the past.” Also true, though Hayate’s delighted smile might be less radiant if she knew which masters and ideas Signum was thinking of. “I will, ah, keep these in mind. Thank you for looking after us.”

Hayate favoured her with a piercing look, and blew out a sigh. “Maybe not enough. You look tired. Come here.” She reached up, and Signum knelt down to allow her young mistress to examine her closely. The misdirected enthusiasm of a few minutes ago subsided as Hayate’s maternal instincts rose to the fore, and she frowned as she inspected Signum’s face.

“Yes, you’re tired. Have you been up late practicing your sword fighting again?” She wagged an admonishing finger. “I’m happy that you have a hobby you enjoy, but I’ve told you, I’m not going to make you fight! You don’t need to practice so much it makes you tired in the mornings!” Signum ducked her head and murmured an apology, unwilling to meet Hayate’s eyes.

Hayate sighed. “And you need to stop skipping meals, too. I know you get caught up in your work, but it’s bad for you.” She hummed thoughtfully and cocked her head. “Come to think of it, I should get started on lunch. Did Shamal and Zafira say when they were going to be back?”

“I don’t believe so. Zafira said he wanted to investigate some interesting new smells near the park. They might be a while.” Not technically a lie, though the two weren’t connected in this outing. Still, Signum winced a little as Hayate sighed again in frustration.

“Urgh, that makes it harder to know when I should start cooking. Hmm. Well, I could make something that keeps well, and maybe take Chikaze some.” Hayate’s eyes tightened fractionally. “She’s back in hospital again. She was doing so well, too...” She shook her head to clear it, though the fine lines of worry creasing her expression didn’t fade.

“I would be happy to take you along to visit her later this afternoon,” Signum offered. That brought a smile to Hayate’s face, tinged with affection and a subtle vein of fond exasperation.

“You don’t need to chaperone me _everywhere,_ ” she teased. “But yes, thank you, that would be good. And...” She broke off, frowning. “Signum, is that...”

Wheeling over, she tugged on Signum’s sleeve, pouting. “Ah, look at this! Is it shrinking in the wash, or something?” She blew out a sigh. “You’re so hard on your clothes, honestly. We’ll need to get you some more soon.”

“That won’t be necessary, really,” countered Signum. “I’m happy with what I’ve got, it’s more than sufficient for...”

“Nope!” Hayate overrode her cheerfully. “We’re going shopping for you this weekend! I won’t let my knights go around in tattered clothes, you deserve nice things to wear!”

“I...” Signum coloured slightly. “Thank you, Hayate. I suppose if you insist, it...”

“And,” Hayate continued over her; eyes sparkling and hands clasped together, “if I go with you, it means I get to help pick your outfits! So many styles and fashions to try on you! Oh, I can’t wait! Hmm, I should start thinking of colours tonight. I bet I can do even better than last time, especially if we make a day of it!”

“...” said Signum, her warm and heartfelt reaction to Hayate’s concern beginning to evaporate.

“Oh!” chirped Hayate. “Actually, that reminds me! While me and Chikaze were planning, we realised that we left you way, _way_ undefended against zombie attack. One bite is all it takes! So we brainstormed a bit, and I did some more designing, and we came up with some new armours for you all! I hope you like them!” She cocked her head. “We checked to see, and the research isn’t clear on whether dogs can become zombies, so I had to make two armour sets for Zaffie; one for each of his forms!”

She leant forward and gave Signum a very serious look. “But,” she cautioned, “remember, you’re only allowed to use them in the event of zombies. No using them as an excuse to do more of that full-contact sparring, I don’t want you to get hurt again like you did that first time.” Signum winced slightly at that memory, then quirked an eyebrow as Hayate started shuffling through the papers to the back. Three pages were selected, with five detailed and heavily annotated drawings spread across them.

“Oh?” Signum asked, reaching for them and pausing for permission. Hayate grinned up at her and handed them over, watching her intently.

“We figure it shouldn’t be too hard to load them in,” she explained as Signum skimmed over the pages. “I remember how I put the first set of armours into the Book, so these should just be a case of doing the same thing again, right?”

“Mmm hmm,” Signum agreed absently, skimming over the rough drawings of Shamal and Vita. The quality of the artwork wasn’t that good, but the comments and pencil lines were enough to convey the point. She flipped past Zafira, scanning over both his forms and cracking a faint smile, then slowed as she got to her own proposed armour. And stopped. And studied it intently.

And smiled.

“Oh yes,” the Knight of the Sword murmured. “Oh yes, I think this will do _very_ nicely.”

Hayate grinned delightedly, then frowned and wagged a playful finger. “Flattery won’t save you!” she scolded. “You’re still coming shopping with me this weekend!”

...

“Uuuuurgh.”

Nanoha slumped down on a park bench, tired and frustrated. Criss-crossing the city had so far proven fruitless, and she felt she deserved a break. The sensor hooked up to Raising Heart had barely made a peep so far – there had been a bit of vague wavering on the low levels that might or might not mean anything to Linith, but nothing noticeably above the baseline. And she’d been at it for most of the morning.

And now, as her stomach was informing her, it was lunchtime. A couple of hours past, in fact.

“I should get something to eat...” she murmured to herself, faintly surprised she hadn’t noticed her hunger earlier.

_‘You really should!’_

The bush beside Nanoha rustled, and a grey-furred head emerged from it. Only part of it was visible, because it held in its steely jaws the body of a demonic beast, a foe both potent and terrible, who had only fallen at the paws of a power beyond any other in the-

“Vesta, is that a pigeon?”

 _‘It’s my lunch! Because_ I _was clever enough and brilliant enough to go and find food when I got hungry! But it’s okay, I forgive you your lapse in wisdom.’_

“It is, isn’t it? It’s a pigeon. A... charred one. Vesta! What have I told you about shooting local wildlife! Even for food! We feed you enough as it is!” Nanoha realised her voice was rising and glanced around, before lowering it and continuing at a hiss. “And you burnt it? You’re not even meant to be using magic!”

 _‘I was hungry! Cooked food tastes better! I bet_ you _wouldn’t want to eat raw pigeon, and my mind comes from yours, so making me eat raw pigeon is like making_ yourself _eat it!’_ Vesta stared up at her mutinously; an effect somewhat ruined by the fact that she hadn’t let go of the pigeon, and quickly continued before Nanoha could bring up the myriad of substances she had seen Vesta ingest willingly; a list that included grass, a pureed blend of pear and tuna from one of Alicia’s cooking experiments, a two-day old dead vole, several tufts of Arf’s fur and one of Nanoha’s own training shots.

_‘Anyway, it was mocking me, flying away when I tried to Vesta Pounce it and perching up on a branch to try and sneer at me! But I showed it! Ha! Take that, flying sky-mousey!’_

Nanoha closed her eyes wearily. Cats were efficient and deadly hunters as it was; Suzuka had often complained about the number of small woodland creatures around her home that became small woodland appetisers. Giving Vesta the powers of flight, invisibility and the ability to shoot lasers had only increased her ability to wreak havoc on any ecosystem she was introduced to. She wondered if this was a common problem with predatory familiars, or if it was just Vesta. Arf certainly didn’t leave dead, half-cooked, half-eaten birds on the kitchen floor, and she certainly couldn’t see Linith doing something like that, so it wasn’t as if it were a cat thing.

... though technically Vesta had been in her child form for that particular incident. Remembering it still made Nanoha feel a bit queasy.

Happily, she was spared having to debate urban wildlife depopulation with her familiar, as her phone chose that moment to ring. Blinking, she fished it out of her pocket and checked the caller-ID.

“Huh? Oh, it’s Fate!” Flipping the mobile open, she cocked her head as she answered it. “Hello? Yeah, we’re in a park at the moment.” She paused, listening. “Uh huh. Uh huh. Oh, wow, really? Okay, sure, we can get there soon. See you!” She snapped it closed and grinned at Vesta. “Fate and Arf have found something! And it’s at the hospital where we became friends.” Her eyes misted over slightly in reminiscence. “It feels like so long ago now... heh. Well, we won’t find out what it is by sitting around here! Come on, Vesta!”

 _‘Hey!’_ complained the kitten as she was rapidly left behind to struggle with the pigeon, which was almost as large as she was. _‘Wait up! Mistress! No fair!’_

The hospital was a little further than Nanoha remembered it being, and she was slightly out of breath by the time she got there; Vesta tagging along a little way behind her to a tune of telepathic grumbling. Nanoha rolled her eyes and ignored the complaints, instead coming to a halt next to Fate and Arf. The blonde girl was sitting on the low wall that separated the hospital grounds from the street, feeding Arf scraps of meat from a ham sandwich.

“It’s coming from over there, or was,” she began without preamble, nodding towards the garden on the other side of the wall without turning towards it. “Someone was doing some very minor spells. And there are traces of magic use around the second floor. I think someone’s been practicing magic here.” A faint smile quirked her lips. “They’re not very good at it, though.”

 _‘Nanoha and Vesta here, so can we investigate now?’_ Arf asked plaintively. _‘You did say!’_

“Yes, yes. Okay, you and Vesta go off and see if you can find who it is, and...”

 _‘Nope!’_ interrupted Vesta. _‘It’s safer to have just one of us go in there, then there’s less chance of being recognised later and you two still have someone with better senses nearby. It’s not like we need both of us to find whoever it is, with this small an area. And anyway, I’m on my lunch break.’_ She bit off another piece of pigeon in demonstration. _‘Arf is all that’s needed.’_

The puppy in question shot her a dirty glare, but rolled her eyes and agreed. _‘She’s right, sort of. We don’t both need to go in, and it_ would _be better to have one of us stay with you two as an early warning system, just in case. I’ll go in and find the source.’_ Suiting word to deed, she hopped off the wall and raced off into the garden, yapping quietly to herself. After a few moments, of quiet, her voice came from somewhere within.

_‘Found her. Over here, back right. You should be able to see us if you circle round a bit; there’s a gap I can see the road through.’_

The bench Arf had found came into view from a point a few dozen yards down the road from their starting point, and Fate and Nanoha leaned on the wall to watch surreptitiously. The little orange puppy was being patted by a pink-haired girl who Nanoha found vaguely familiar, though she couldn’t place a finger on why. There was something else, too, a faint buzz that she took a few moments to identify.

“Fate, she’s using telepathy!” she whispered, when she got it. Fate frowned, examining the girl in more detail, and then nodded tensely.

“To Arf, yes. Do you think she knows?” _‘Arf, what’s she saying?’_ she added telepathically.

 _‘Not much. Mostly the kind of stuff you’d say to a normal dog out loud, she’s just saying it telepathically for some reason. Maybe she’s practicing?’_ The girl tried to scratch under her chin, and Arf obligingly rolled over for a belly rub. _‘I don’t think she knows I’m a familiar; I’m playing it dumb and she’s nowhere near good enough to pick up telepathy.’_

The girl had apparently given up on talking to Arf at this point, and while her hands were still absently petting the puppy, her eyes were wandering around for something else to focus on. Apparently she found something in the small decorative trees, and Nanoha felt the buzz of telepathy start again.

[Do you wish for me to intercept the target’s telepathic communication, my master?] chimed Raising Heart.

Nanoha blinked. “... wait, you can do that?” she asked, before realising what a stupid question it was. Raising Heart’s reply came readily, though, with no trace of impatience.

[Yes, my master. No encryption is present.]

Nanoha blushed a little, and gave the question some serious thought. On the one hand, it felt kind of... wrong, to be spying on the girl’s private conversations like that. On the other...

“... yes, okay. Do it.”

There was a heartbeat of silence, and then the girl’s voice drifted into her head. _‘down here? No? I don’t think the little doggy will hurt you. Do you understand me, Mr Bird? Or Miss, I can’t tell. Come on, I know about magic and things, if you can talk you can just say so...’_

Nanoha blushed a bit harder. There _had_ been a point, not long after she’d met Yuuno, where she’d gone around talking to various animals to see if any of them could speak, too. None of them had, of course, but it had been something she’d sort-of wondered about until she’d found out he wasn’t really a ferret.

“I, uh, guess she just knows a little bit about magic, somehow?” she wondered aloud to Fate to take her mind off that little embarrassment. But Fate, she found, was staring at the girl with a strange intensity, lips moving like she was trying to work something out. She tapped Bardiche, and a quick exchange passed between her and the golden Device, too fast for Nanoha to catch any meaning from. Whatever it had been, it seemed to confirm something to Fate, because her expression cleared and she sagged back slightly.

“It _is_ her,” she whispered, half to herself. Then she turned to Nanoha more animatedly. “It’s _her_ , Nanoha! One of the girls from the hospital, do you remember?”

“One of the... oh. Oh!” Nanoha spun back. Now that she was looking for it... yes, she remembered healing this girl, the one they’d found under the barrier on that scary, terrible day.

“She was in the barrier,” murmured Fate, obviously thinking along the same lines. “I guess she must have had some talent all along, that’s why she was pulled under.” She paled. “She’s... sick, though. And if she’s got some talent... she’s like your friend Arisa, she’s a potential target! We...” She stopped, torn. “No, she’d probably remember us if we talked to her – almost certainly, actually. We... should probably tell Linith about her, then. Maybe we can find some way to warn her.”

Arf came trotting back across the grass, tail wagging happily. _‘Warn who of what now?’_ she asked, jumping up to grab at the wall and peddling with her back legs for a moment to scramble up onto it. _‘Who are we warning?’_

“The girl, she’s a potential target,” Fate explained. “She was in the hospital last time, too, so she’s sick. Long-term sick. A draining would almost certainly kill her. We... oh, no.” She pursed her lips as Nanoha gave her an inquisitive look of concern. “I... I don’t want to worry Mother with this. She’s already under enough stress; we shouldn’t be asking her to do even more planning and set-up to warn some girls we don’t even really know...”

She sighed and shook her head. “I’ll talk to Linith about it,” she decided. “And for now, she could probably recognise us if she saw us, so we shouldn’t be hanging around here. Come on, let’s do a few more hours and then go back.”

A rumbling growl interrupted her last few words.

“And Nanoha, go get something to eat.”

...

Two worlds away, near the coast of what Earth natives called mainland China, a group of TSAB mages were engaged in busy activity around a half-constructed pylon. It stood almost three storeys high, and just setting up the base and raising the antenna had already taken the better part of three hours. The men and women milling around it cast occasional wary glances at the sky, or the shaded cover of a forest edge in the middle distance. Bushes and the occasional ditch dotted the plain here and there, but otherwise the surroundings offered easy lines of sight in all directions.

The wandering sauroids were being watched with particular concern. Hopefully none of them would be stupid enough to try to break through an electric fence, but giant lizards might just be stupid enough to try.

Ensconced in a protective bubble of stealth wards between them and the shore, Shamal watched as they scurried around the sensor node they were erecting, chattering to one another with the nervous edge of fear. Something had them on edge. Something more than whatever reasons the TSAB had for being here in the first place. What had prompted the sudden flurry of activity and the Bureau’s apparent desire to have eyes all over the region, Shamal couldn’t say. But she could hazard a guess.

 _‘It certainly seems as though our time under the radar is over,’_ she sent to Zafira. She couldn’t see the wolf-familiar, but that wasn’t surprising. While not a stealth specialist, he was by no means incapable of subtlety, and there was easily enough cover around for him to go unseen unless someone was actively looking for him. _‘Are you in position?’_

_‘Almost. Have you heard anything about what brought on this sudden interest in the region?’_

_‘Nothing useful. Though they’re_ very _nervous. They look like they expect to be attacked.’_ She frowned disapprovingly. _‘Signum and Vita haven’t been, ah...’_

 _‘I don’t think so, no. It may just be paranoia. If they suspect we’re in the area, I can understand why they would be wary.’_ A soft huff of laughter echoed over the link. _‘And in this case, you’ll admit it’s somewhat justified.’_

 _‘Hmm,’_ Shamal replied non-committedly, as she frowned, picking apart the control mechanisms of a proximity sensor. _‘_ Do _they know we’re in the area? Are we sure this is for us?’_

There was a pause as they both thought that through for a moment, and Zafira slowly manoeuvred himself into a better position. _‘Perhaps?’_ he hedged. _‘I must admit, I’m not sure what alerted them. We’ve been staying fairly low-key, I can’t think of any way they should have been able to notice us. But by the same measure, most events big enough to spark a reaction like this would have been easy for_ us _to notice. And the only things I can think of are those girls and the masked figure that attacked Vita.’_

 _‘You think they are part of the TSAB after all?’_ Shamal raised an eyebrow in concern. That would make things... complicated, if it were true. With two encounters under their belt; one almost successful, they already had far more tactical information on Vita’s capabilities than was safe. They were still ignorant of her higher arsenal, thankfully, and the rest of the Wolkenritter would be complete unknowns, but it still wasn’t a good position from which to start a confrontation with the Bureau. Last time had been disaster enough for her tastes.

_‘Not necessarily. One of the disguised figures protected Vita, remember? But in the end... part of, working with, in contact with, opposing... it doesn’t really matter. The TSAB are obviously here to investigate something, and there’s no way they’re going to leave now. We can’t afford to stop gathering, so all we can do is adapt and overcome.’_

Shamal nodded. _‘We are the Knights of the Book of Darkness,’_ she agreed. _‘No matter the enemy, we shall prevail.’_ Her eyes turned to the pylon, which was starting to develop bristles of sensory and detection equipment, plugged into nodes up and down its length. _‘And on that note, if you’re in a good position, I think now would be a good time to interfere. I’d prefer not to allow them to turn that thing on.’_

_‘I’m ready. Waiting on you to start.’_

“Very well...” she murmured, clicking the rings that graced her fingers together. “Klarwind?” she requested lightly, rising into the air and gliding towards the pylon. The Armed Device responded smoothly, and the air around her hands shimmered slightly as something passed through it. Hair-thin wires snaked out, so thin as to be invisible even without the layer of illusion she was wrapped in, and plunged into one of the boxy modules bolted onto the side of the pylon about two thirds of the way up.

A few seconds later, all hell broke loose at the structure’s base.

She could hear them shouting about system failures and hardware defects. One particularly fast-acting youngster already had windows up and was busy throwing up new, hastily-activated isolation firewalls to stop the remote mage who was clearly trying to attack the systems.

Sadly for them, Klarwind had its wires in the hardware, and was busy wrecking the system from within. Perhaps they could have dealt with an infowar assault; at the very least, cutting all power to the systems as they eventually did would have stopped her attack. But when an invisible Belkan knight was literally tearing their systems apart from the inside with microfilament razor-wire, there was only so much that could be done without dealing with the mage. And they didn’t even know she was here.

They did their best. Barely two minutes after her first attack, the voices below intensified as the last remnants of working hardware disintegrated, and Shamal withdrew her wires with a flick of her wrist and a smile.

 _‘Now, please,’_ she asked.

She was expecting it, and so she felt the faint brush of the wards going up over the area. But so light were they, and so absorbed were the men and women below in shouting at one another and frantically banging on the pylon interface that she doubted they would realise what had happened until they attempted to teleport, flee or contact someone outside the field. Even so, it would make it tiresome if she and Zafira had to chase them around the subtle barrier that now enclosed them, and there was always the chance that one of them might be able to slip past it. So it was best to act now, before they pulled themselves together enough to try and contact their commanders.

The Knight of the Lake spread her hands, and four wires dipped down to the gathered crowd below. Moving with purpose, each one struck, snakelike, piercing the protection of the Barrier Jacket enough to touch the skin at the back of their targets’ necks. Four victims, each one of the mages she had identified as the leaders of this group, felt nothing more than a faint pinprick at the top of their spine.

“Tiefer Schlaf,” she whispered.

Four bodies dropped prone. Without a warning, without a sound, they fell. Shouts turned into screams as the group realised they were under attack, and they began to scatter.

But not fast enough. A binding net came hurtling down on them before more than a handful could react, and nearly a dozen of them were trapped under glowing white cords in an instant, their arms and legs tightly locked in place.

Five remained, and one of them was clearly a Belkan-user. His spear came out in a hurried motion – wasteful, Shamal thought; clumsy and unpracticed. He wasn’t used to having to draw it and take a stance so quickly, and it showed.

He managed to turn in the approximate direction the net had come from, and raise the spear into a reasonable attempt at a guard position.

Then Zafira landed half a metre inside his range and let loose three blows to the solar plexus that broke his Barrier Jacket like glass, hurling him clean off his feet and into one of his companions.

Shamal didn’t bother to watch any further. There were only three mages left standing, all within ten metres of Zafira, and the Devices they were only just starting to point at him were shooting-optimised. The fight was over. She busied herself knocking out the eleven mages trapped by the Steel Net that had effectively ended the fight almost before it started and disabling their Devices. Sealing them was an annoyance; even Storage Devices had enough security to make things difficult in that regard. Happily, triggering shutdown was one of the easier functions to force, and it didn’t take long to clear the area of anything that could record what came next.

“Well,” she said as she finished. “That went well. And no interference, which is a nice bonus.” Holding one of the storage Devices in her hands, she frowned as she got to work with a deeper level of subversion. It had belonged to the individual who had been the team leader, and there was enough data on here for her to hack together an automated all-clear report-in signal using his voice. That should hopefully give at least hour’s delay to any chase, unless the TSAB had massively changed their protocols since the last time they had been active.

Zafira smiled mirthlessly. “I’m sure if there were any, our mysterious protectors would arrive to help us in the nick of time.”

Shamal frowned at him. “You keep mentioning that. Why are you so focused on it? It was a single event, you’re assigning a lot of weight to something we don’t even know for sure was an act of allegiance.”

He shook his head, moving over to the pylon and considering it carefully. “That’s just it; it _was_ an act of allegiance. Or at least mutual goals. The outcomes that the interference of the masked men caused were for Vita to escape unharmed without using any more power, and for those two attackers to survive. But if the latter had been the only goal, why defend Vita? Interrupting her spell should have been enough. No, the second one _defended_ her. It _wanted_ her to escape. And that doesn’t make sense. We’re alone here. We have no faction to call our own, no support base, no allies.” His mouth twitched in a grim smile. “Unless Hayate is fully aware of what we’re doing and has a group of stealth-focused mages she’s set to tailing us in order to make sure we accomplish it, something is going on. Something I don’t understand, and therefore don’t like.”

Shamal rolled her eyes. “I am certain that our Mistress is not secretly sending other assets to help us.” She paused. “Well, almost certain. I believe she is currently more occupied with... ah... the threat of zombies.”

Zafira grinned wolfishly; his lips curling back in a motion that was unnervingly reminiscent of his alternate form. “Don’t you just get the impish urge to tell her about some of the threats we’ve faced?”

Shamal shot him a sharp, disapproving look. “No,” she replied. “But... I do see your point about the masked men. Put like that, it’s... worrying.”

“Yeah. But let me worry about it for now.” He tapped the pylon twice, nodded to himself, and stepped back. Then, in a sudden burst of motion, he lashed forwards with a white-blazing fist and struck the metal with a ringing crash that echoed across the landscape. The metal burst inwards as if a bomb had gone off on its surface, and with a groaning creak, the pylon tilted, tipped and fell.

“Come on,” continued Zafira as if nothing had happened, dusting his hands off absently. “Let’s get these people drained and get out of here.”

...

It came just as the draining finished. Had Zafira not been watchful and wary in spite of the peaceful surroundings, it might even have been successful.

Shamal stood at the centre of the piled-up bodies, the Book-simulacra in her hands occupying her full attention. Faint trails of light spun upwards from the prone forms like funnels of spider silk, curving down again into the pages that drank them up. Mass drainings like this were less efficient and slower to eke out all the magic from a Linker Core, but it was still vastly quicker to do one mass draining than to leech from every individual person in situations such as this.

But her focus made her blind to the thin grey blade that whirled soundlessly towards her throat, from the side opposite Zafira. It caught his eye as a flicker, but it was the shields he’d raised around Shamal that stopped it; flaring into visibility as the knife-projectile skittered off a plane of white.

“Wha-“ Zafira began, before gritting his teeth and darting closer to Shamal. The next attack would almost certainly come from a different angle, and Shamal was still busy draining the last few drops from their previous opponents, so the onus was on him for defence. Surreptitiously, he fed power to the shields. The next shot would be aimed to break them.

It wasn’t. Instead, Zafira’s eyes widened in shock and no little horror as a cluster of tightly packed grey rays came in from an upwards angle, directed not at him or Shamal, but at the prone mages! They didn’t _look_ lethal at a glance, but he couldn’t think of any positive outcome of them connecting, so he jerked an arm upwards in a hasty motion. Three wide spikes of white light – more plates than spikes, to be honest – erupted from the ground at his command, and the grey rain scattered off his defences like the last attack.

A bloom of readied magic behind him signalled the end of Shamal’s draining. She held the Book in one hand, and her wires were already floating on the breeze in readiness.

 _‘What do we have?’_ she asked in clipped tones.

_‘Not sure. Something tried to hit you in the throat mid-drain. Couldn’t identify the spell they cast at our targets; blocked it anyway. They’re either well-hidden or using stealth gear; I can’t... wait, there!’_

Fast and low, a blurred, slender form was rushing across the plain towards them. It was masked and muffled by an anonymous Jacket, just like the other two had been, and both Knights scowled, preparing themselves for its assault.

It ignored Zafira completely, focusing entirely on Shamal and streaking towards her as if it intended to ram her. Zafira lunged into its path, his form flowing from human to wolf in mid-leap, and vicious jaws snapped towards its outstretched arm. Somehow, though, it avoided his fangs, falling into a fluid roll that took it out of his range and gave it traction to spring at Shamal once again. She still stood at the centre of the unconscious mages, and only her quick wirework stopped it tackling her away from them. Glowing green lines missed its torso but caught its ankle, and in lieu of a proper binding spell she threw her hand out and hurled it back towards Zafira. She threw both arms out, bringing the dormant barrier – relaxed for stealth – back up to full strength.

Even as she did that, the wolf was ready with raking claws and snapping jaws. For an instant as his teeth fastened down on the figure’s arm, the cloth – or was that flesh? – of its arm shifted to a cold, dead black. It didn’t cry out in pain at the injury, though. Instead, its other arm... shifted?

Shamal couldn’t tell if it was a spell or some sort of fluid-form weapon, but the figure’s arm rippled and flowed like liquid into a spiked blade, which it brought down on Zafira’s head as he dashed it to the ground. He was already disengaging as it did so, blood dripping from his mouth. The reason became clear as he let go of its arm; which was as spiked and bladed as its partner. Thrown off by his movement, the blow caught him on the shoulder rather than between the eyes, opening up a thin, shallow gash that barely missed his collarbone.

Apparently unconcerned by an arm that was almost certainly broken, and dislocated at the shoulder to boot, the figure backed off cautiously. Wary now of their power at close range, it peppered them with barbs and bolts of grey, but with two layers of shielding in place, none of its attacks came close. It circled them, unwilling to break off combat and retreat even if it could get through the barrier, but unable to pierce their defences.

 _‘Zafira, I can’t get a good look at it,’_ Shamal sent quietly. _‘Are you having any more success?’_

 _‘None,’_ he replied. Now that it wasn’t moving as fast, it was clear that the blurred outline wasn’t due to movement on its part, but rather EMCM. The outline and details of their attacker were masked by a shimmering, wavering heat-haze that stymied any attempts at examination and made observation pointless.

 _‘It’s not right, though,’_ he added. _‘That blow it landed, it didn’t draw its arm back for it. It was more like... well, something from me, or Signum. No build-up, no acceleration, just instant force. Muscle tissue can’t do that. And it’s too inured to pain; I broke its arm and it didn’t even flinch.’_

_‘A mana construct? Familiar, perhaps?’_

_‘Maybe...’_ His eyes narrowed as he focused in on the dancing, fluctuating silhouette. The heat-haze made it surprisingly hard to track; breaking up its form and camouflaging it against the homogenous surroundings. Another volley of smoky projectiles lanced in, aimed at the prone bodies around them. He snarled, and whirling distortion-shields scattered them in every direction.

_‘It’s trying to drive us away from them, but I can’t tell if it wants to wake them up or kill them... urgh. Enough of this. If I box it in, can you get a bind on it? I want to see what this thing is.’_

_‘I agree.’_ Shamal’s lips were thinned. _‘If you can force it towards us, I can pin it down long enough to neutralise. Whenever you’re ready.’_

Returning to human form, Zafira didn’t bother to announce his readiness in words. The trio of spikes that erupted from the ground behind the circling figure were statement enough. It escaped unharmed with only a light showering of dirt, but another spike burst up in its path, almost skewering it and forcing it to throw itself to the right. If a human had tried a similar movement with a broken, dislocated arm, they would have been all but incapacitated by the pain. This figure barely seemed slowed, though its injured arm dangled limp and useless as it contorted itself towards them.

Perhaps it was not entirely immune to the pain, though, or perhaps it was merely more focused on Zafira’s assault than was wise. Either way, it failed to notice the hair-thin strand in its path until it was far too late. With a sickening jerk, Shamal’s trap fastened around its throat and yanked it four or five metres through the air into a web of green wire that bound it helplessly. Shamal had already opened a portal in the air before her, and she sunk her hand into it with a quiet smile.

“Ah!”

Zafira’s grin faltered as she yanked her hand back with a shocked gasp. “Its Linker Core... it’s not natural! Not even like a Familiar, there’s no connection, it’s... it’s plugged into something! Something artifi...”

The figure reacted instantly. With a thin scream, it _wrenched_ its way free from the binding and dived for her, both arms morphing into vicious spikes, all semblance of caution or strategy gone. Its skin turned jet black again, and a red glow began to well up from deep inside...

Zafira’s spike exploded from the ground in its path, and such was its speed that dodging was impossible, even for something inhumanly agile. It jerked to a stop, impaled clean through the chest almost halfway down the length of the spike by its own desperate momentum, ten or fifteen metres away from the Knights.

“Alive?” said Shamal simply.

“No,” Zafira replied. “Combat automaton. The promise doesn’t hold us.”

One of Shamal’s ring-wires, whisper-thin and wickedly strong, lashed around its throat and tore its head off in one smooth motion.

Most corpses sagged in death. This one went further. It wilted like a flower, and then kept going, bursting into a sudden torrent of oily liquid that caught light as it poured onto the ground. The fire burnt with a hellish heat and ferocity, scorching the ground and giving off waves of heat that Zafira and Shamal could feel even from the other side of a barrier.

Both of them froze in shock. Then, slowly, grimly, they turned to meet each other’s eyes. After a moment of grave contemplation, lit by the white-hot chemical fire, Shamal nodded towards the unconscious mages.

“I... I think we should set off one of their distress beacons,” she managed to force out, with impressive composure. “And then get back home as fast as we can. The others need to know about this.”

Zafira nodded, and his word was a snarl, baring gleaming teeth as he spat it out like a curse.

_‘Mariage.’_

...

The dust-laden clouds howled across the surface of the rust-red planet. There was not one trace of green in these barren wastes, not one living soul. The winds screamed their way down canyons and across rises, and just for a moment were deflected around a figure of metal and flesh.

The thing shaped like a woman, which had once been a woman and was so no longer, stepped forwards into the wind-shadow of a cave and descended into the recess. There was something in here, hidden behind a recently constructed false wall. Something white and linear in this world of rust red ruin. A steady hum came from it, audible in the thin, cold air.

A once-man met the figure as it approached the bottom of the slope, emerging from the deeper parts of the cavern near the large white shape. They stood facing one another for an instant, then the resident turned and went back the way it had come, the newcomer following at its heels. No sound passed between them and their faces remained expressionless and indifferent, but a communication of sorts was taking place.

_‘Report.’_

_‘Four sensors were neutralised. Two hostiles were found in possession of [Source]. 0043 was destroyed; the [Source] was not retrieved.’_

The commander – though the word was a poor-fitting description for the role of this second marionette, who gave no orders and held no rank – nodded. _‘Power gathered?’_

_‘Minimal.’_

The ship loomed before them, a great blocky disruption of the natural wind- and water-worn shape of the cave that sat fat and heavy at its centre. It barely fit in the cavernous space, leaving only a metre or so of room to sidle around it, and it was clearly far too big to have come down the sloped opening the marionettes now reached the bottom of. In all respects it was unnatural; something that had no place in this world of rust-red dust and debris.

The corridors of the ship were almost as cold as the bitter air outside; the heating turned off along with most of the other functions to save power for where it was needed. The figures showed no concern for the chill as they proceeded along the clean white-grey corridors, interrupted here and there by a slash mark or burnt patch. There were others like them here, and there would be more coming soon, but for now their business did not lay with their kin, nor in the freezer rooms with corpses resting in their tanks of gel. It lay at the heart of the ship, near its engine; a great cylindrical thing fed fuel from the reservoir behind it. Unlike the reactors of dimensional cruisers, it was set up primarily to produce electricity, with magic a mere side-conversion to power specific systems like the dimensional shift drive.

Inadequate for their purpose. But not useless.

The guts of the ship were strewn across the room; cannibalised systems jury-rigged into a more advanced conversion unit. The idling of the engine was carefully tuned, feeding as much power as possible into the trickle of mana by-product, but even with all the effort they had expended, the efficiency of the fuel-to-electricity-to-mana conversion was still less than ten percent. Still, a trickle of magic _was_ being produced, feeding into another bulky machine; a kludged-together capacitor bank that sat next to the doorway into the adjacent room.

And in that room, there was a throne. Ancient, black and ornate, it was entirely out of place in this salvaged, butchered place of industry.

The figure that occupied it was small. Slender. Waif-like, in fact; a mere child. Long red hair fell in a wavy curtain down her back, with two long bangs trailing across her face. Her clothes were elaborate, if antique, and her face bore careful, intricate lines of paint that gave her soft features a sharper, more regal appearance.

She half-sat, half-slumped; insensate in a throne made for someone three times her size. Wires slid under her heavy, formal garments; attached to both diagnostic machines and the capacitor bank by the door. Her head lay still against one of the high armrests, and her breathing was slow, regular and so faint as to be almost imperceptible. Deep in hibernation, pale and pitiful in the cold, clinical surroundings, she looked a far cry from any of the frightening or foreboding titles she had held in the past. Without power, she couldn’t even wake up.

But power was what her two visitors were here to provide.

The capacitor bank was almost completely charged, and with a wordless signal from the consensus, it sputtered to life and disgorged a stream of power down the wires that linked her to it. Magic flooded her young body in a torrent, and she jerked awake with a pained moan of protest. Had she had the lung capacity, it would have been a scream.

The leader ignored her distress and knelt in front of her, the other following its lead. As she quietened again and a glow of magic began to build around her, the kneeling figures spoke as one.

“My liege, our operations proceed well. Thirteen more followers have been added to our forces, and we have neutralised a total of eight temporary monitoring stations our enemies are erecting in the local area. Additionally, we have located a potential power source that far exceeds our current one, and plans have been set in motion to obtain it. We apologise, liege, for the inferior quality of this current arrangement. We know this pains you.”

There was no regret in the inhuman chorus.

With effort, the girl opened her eyes to look at the thing as it spoke. Her gaze was the same shade of glowing green as the eye-slits of the visor-masks fused to the flesh of the monsters born of her.

She stirred, coming to full awareness as they knelt to her; their precious progenitor-princess, the font from which they spilled. Every part of this little ritual was part of an ancient act designed to fool people into thinking she was a human queen, continued long after the need for it was gone. Once upon a time it had kept the rulers of Galea safe, masters of the monster-weapons they had forged in the bloodshed of the Dawn States.

No more. Fallen was Galea; its monarchs lost in long-ago war. But the weapons lived on.

The foreign power flooded the system of the queen of the monsters, and she hungered. The endless, gnawing hunger from deep within her demanded more magic, more and more. Every time they forced her from her slumber and fed her endless hunger and sent her into another cycle of core production, it hurt in bliss-tempered agony. 

She had stopped trying to find another way of existence a long, long time ago. She did not know how old she was, but the sleep could consume decades, centuries of slow-dreaming hibernation. Each time she woke, it would be to pain and hunger. Sometimes the monotony was broken by the latest fool from a usurper-kingdom who thought to use her and her progeny-arsenal to claw out their own power. But it always ended in blood and death. Everything always did. Now she merely sat there, staring without seeing towards the thing that spoke of enemy force distribution, potential yields of the newfound power source and other things she neither wanted nor needed to hear. She sank into memories instead, and tried as she always did, to lose herself in long-lost days. Happier days.

“Somnio visio me turbavit,” she whispered in her native tongue, the lilting words of a childhood rhyme. “Et tamen anima non quiescit. Quod haec visio qui somnio vi...vidit ma-”

It wasn’t long before the capacitor bank ran dry, and the flow of power stopped. Once again she felt the pull of sleep, and her mind began to fog as the glowing light around her flickered and died, the new cores sparkling in front of her.

The marionette noticed. Still kneeling, it brought one hand across its chest in a formal gesture of fealty. “Rest now, my liege,” it said. “Sleep until next we bring you offerings. We, your Mariage, will guard you.”

She murmured a faint protest. But so weak was she that she barely heard it herself. If the Mariage registered it, they gave no sign.

Her eyes drifted inexorably closed, and darkness claimed her once again.

...


	7. Chapter Six

It was mid-afternoon on Midchilda, with hours yet before evening. Nonetheless, it was late enough that the schools had let out. The sun shone down on streets thronged with children heading home from school.

To the six-and-seven-months-year old dashing down the pavement, this was a blessing. It had now been _ages_ since Tiida had left – a whole _fourteen days_ , which was nearly three weeks! That meant that he _had_ to have gotten to where he was going by now, and _that_ meant that she would definitely have a video message from him waiting for her today! For sure, this time! And if there wasn’t one, it was probably that... that he was busy having a big fight with an evil Galean cyborg summoner or something! Not that he was... hurt, or too far away, or just didn’t want to talk to her, or... or anything like that.

So reassured, Teana Lanster picked up her pace a little. Orange light glimmered under her heels as she scooted along the pavement a few feet at a time, making “vwoom” noises under her breath. She had decided that when she was a Lieutenant-Commodore-Admirable Enforcer-General, she would get a set of rollerskates so she could skate everywhere, just like Mrs Quint. Only hers would have fire rockets on the back, or something! And...

Her daydreams continued as she made her way back to the care home she had to live in until Tiida came back. Her friends had been sympathetic to her plight, which was something, but sleepovers only went so far. It had been much nicer living with Auntie Sara, even if she did have a loud scream-y baby who cried all the time and smelt funny.

It was both too soon and too slowly that she arrived back at the care home. It was run by the Bureau for children like her whose parents or guardians had to go away to fight bad guys. Or who died while they were fighting bad guys... Tea shivered, shook the thought off and trudged past the gate and up to the large three-storey building. The door buzzer gave its customary two-tone chime as she made her way into the entrance hall, and the lady in the office poked her head out.

“Ah, Teana,” she smiled, and tapped briefly on her tablet-Device. “Okay, you’re signed in. Welcome back, how was school?”

“Fine,” muttered Tea, then looked up pleadingly. “Did I get a message today? Has it arrived yet? Please?”

The lady smiled indulgently. “Well, I can check... let me see, Teana Lanster...” her finger skimmed across the tablet until she reached the right entry and tapped twice. “It looks like... you do indeed have a video message wai...”

“Big brother!” Tea interrupted her with a whoop. “Yay! Can I watch it now? I promise I’ll do all my homework later but I want to hear from Tiida again now! Please?!”

Laughing, waving off the bouncing six-year old, the woman capitulated. “Alright, alright, you can watch it now. Can I have your Device?”

The civ-Device was duly offered; a small rectangular screen with its edges liberally decorated with stickers, colours and the occasional dent. The woman tapped away at her tablet for a moment, held Tea’s Device above it briefly, and nodded in satisfaction when both beeped. She handed it back to Tea with an indulgent look.

“Alright, there you go. Just be sure that you get your homework done once you’re finished watching it.” She sighed. “And try not to get into any more fights? I know that the scuffle with Tiguan wasn’t really your fault, but you didn’t need to start shouting back at him. Next time, just come and fetch one of us, okay?”

Tea pouted, but nodded, sensing that agreement was the quickest way to escape. Scampering out of the office, she considered where to go to listen to her precious message. The recreational rooms were right out – they would be full of other children hogging the games and seats like always. Outside was a possibility, but it was getting a bit cold. Her bedroom was possible, though. As long as none of the girls she had to share it with were there, she could curl up with her pillow and see what her brother had to say to her.

Mind made up, she headed off upstairs, ducking under the arm of another care worker heading down and dodging as a wildly spiralling ball rocketed down from the flight above. She would normally stay and watch - a toy outside the rec. room would probably get the kids responsible yelled at – but she had more important business today. With a trace of regret, she left the swiftly-developing shouting match behind and made her way to her room, swiping her Device over the door to open it and kicking it shut after her.

Two bunk beds, two desks and a riot of posters met her gaze, but no inhabitants were to be found. The room was empty.

Good.

She clambered up to her bed; the top bunk closer to the door, and pushed her covers and pillow up to make a backrest. Relaxing against her impromptu throne, she keyed her Device to open a holographic window, and hit play.

Tiida’s face flickered into view, too large and out of focus for a second before the view stabilised. He was sitting in a sparse-looking room and looked somewhat haggard. A small window behind him showed a thin strip of sky. From the colour, it was late evening or early night.

“Hi Tea,” he began. “It’s good to... well, not ‘see you’, I suppose, but talk to you. This will have to be a fairly short message, because we have some jobs to do tomorrow and I need to get some sleep before that. As you see, though, we’ve arrived.” He gestured to his surroundings. “We’re in a...”

“Hey, Tiida!” another voice broke in. “Whatcha doing? Oh, hey, video message? Is it for your sister?” The image jostled briefly, and an upside-down head of green hair came into view, leaning in from behind the viewpoint. “Hey Tea! Don’t worry, we’ll- hey!”

Tiida removed the intruder by the straightforward method of grabbing her by the head and pushing. She vanished from sight, and Tea heard a loud thump and a yelp from offscreen. Quiet grumbling announced her retreat.

“... so yes,” Tiida continued resignedly. “Mei is here too. And Rizu and Heidi, as well. They all say ‘hi’. There’s another team here as well, but you don’t know any of them.”

Tea glared at roughly where Mei had been briefly visible, reminded of the theft of her precious milk. She still needed to get revenge for that. But plans of retribution could wait until later; Tiida was still talking.

“I saw Miss Quint. She remembered you.” Tea grinned and bounced happily at this, with a quiet ‘yes!’ Tiida smiled, apparently expecting her reaction. “I’m sure she’d like to see you again, too. I’ll see if she can come to your birthday party once we’re done with the mission, okay?”

“Yes!” Tea punched the air in triumph. “And get her to bring me a pair of rollerblades like hers!” she demanded, momentarily forgetting that she was addressing a recording. “And a set of punching gloves! Or, hmm. No. I want guns like yours. Maybe gun gloves? Or...”

“Anyway,” Tiida continued, unaware of her monologue, “I’m apparently now an ‘Amerikan’ according to my forms. That means I’m from another country on this world – we’re obviously foreign, so that should stop people asking too many questions. She’s also got some natives who don’t know they’re working for us to buy us a warehouse and an apartment near it. That’s where I am now.” He grinned. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to move you out here.”

Tea huffed indignantly at the interruption. “I should think not!” she said, pouting.

“I can’t give you an exact time I’ll be back, but I’m still confident I’ll be able to come to your birthday party. I’ll bring you a present from here, if you like – I’m sure I can find something while... huh?” He looked up and past the viewpoint as someone distant spoke briefly, and his eyes widened. “They... what? Oh... oh, no. Okay, just a minute.” He quickly turned back to the screen. “Tea, sorry, but I need to cut this short now. Uh, don’t worry, it’s nothing serious. We’re just, ah, having a bit of trouble with some equipment. Now, I know you don’t like the care home, but try to be a good girl for them, and I’ll try to be back as soon as possible, alright?” He smiled sadly. “And I’ll also try my best not to get dragged off on missions at such short notice in future. Love you.”

“Love you...” she echoed, and the message ended as he hastily got up to leave, freezing on the last frame with him halfway out of the seat.

She sighed, hugging her legs to her chest and staring at his face on the screen. It had been taken hours ago, she knew – she’d counted them just the day before; ten and a half hours to get there, and then a slightly different day length that meant his day-night cycle wasn’t synchronised with hers.

Ten and a half hours. It felt like a very long distance separating them, at the moment.

“I’ll try my best, big brother,” she mumbled, resting her chin on her knees. “Just... you have to keep your end, too.” She bit her lip worriedly. “Whatever you’re doing right now... come back from it. You promised. I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t.”

...

“Faaaaaaaaate! Did you get the chocolate like you promised? Here, here, let me see! How much did you get? Is it very yummy?” Alicia’s voice preceded her as she rushed into the teleport room, vibrating impatiently as she made a beeline for Fate. Diving forward, she latched onto her sister’s arm and clung to it insistently.

“Faaaaaaaaate,” she repeated emphatically, tugging on the captured appendage. “Faaaaaaaate. Fate. Fate. Fate. Faaaaaaaaaaaaate.”

Fate laughed. Moving a little awkwardly from the little-girl-shaped mass burdening her right arm, she shimmied halfway out of the bulging, oversized rucksack she wore. “I brought as much as I could fit in the bag,” she confirmed. “But you’ll have to let go of me if you want it.”

“Awww...” Alicia hesitated, distressed at this new dilemma. Eventually, though, greed won out over hugging. She disentangled herself from Fate’s arm and grabbed at the proffered rucksack.

“Oooo!” As she opened it, she was forced to catch several bars of chocolate slipping out, so crammed full was the bulging fabric. Eyes wide in awe, Alicia struggled to take its weight properly as she rummaged around inside. Most of the bars were plain milk chocolate, though there were a few other kinds mixed in among them.

“We had to tell the man that we were buying for a whole party,” Arf put in. “I was the adult. Honestly, I think he was still a bit suspicious about why we needed so many. So this is all you get, okay? Spend them wisely!”

“Mmm hmm!” Impersonating a hamster with an entire bar crammed into her mouth, Alicia looked up and nodded absently. Then, ignoring them, she returned to cooing over her treasure trove. Nanoha and Fate traded amused glances and left her to it as Linith breezed in.

“Girls!” she greeted them warmly, though she seemed a little distracted. “It’s lovely to see you back. Did things go well?”

The girls traded glances, and Arf stepped up to be spokeswoman. “There were, uh, a couple of snags,” she said. “But mostly we did fine. We got a good spread of data, and I think Fate wanted to-”

“Ohhh! Mmmm!” yelled Alicia, interrupting her mid-sentence. “Mmmesmph...” she swallowed hastily. “Best idea ever! Where’s Mrs Sad Metal Lady Who Isn’t Exactly A Lady But Is Kind Of Like Me? I can give her... or, um, her-im, yeah, I can give her-im some chocolate and then she-he’ll be happier because chocolate is yummy yummy yummy!” She hugged the bag to her and squeaked in alarm as it tipped over, squashing her to the floor.

“I, uh...” began Linith, blinking. “Well, I think I last saw Ićeoak checking crates in the forward cargo bay, if that’s who you mean. But I’m not... sure that... oh dear,” she finished quietly as Alicia squirmed out from under the bag, attempted to pick it up, failed, and resorted to dragging it off without waiting for anything more. The faint ‘shhhh’ of the canvas sliding over the metal floor as she tugged it away with both hands, putting all her slight weight into the task, receded surprisingly quickly around the door and down the corridor.

 _‘... yeah, I’ll go after her and help carry it, shall I?’_ offered Vesta. She jumped down from Nanoha’s shoulder, transforming in midair, and landed in her adult form. “You need me for the telling-Linith-stuff, Arf?”

“No, that’s fine. I can handle it. You go help Alicia.” Arf nodded at Vesta’s salute, and turned back to Linith as the catgirl sped off.

“So, um, yeah,” continued Arf. “There was some strange stuff – the readings around the bay are a little higher than everywhere else, but I’m pretty sure that’s residue left over from, uh... the last time we were here. Is six months too long for that to still be hanging around?”

Linith pursed her lips thoughtfully. “It’s a little unusual,” she admitted. “But water does trap mana fairly well. If the seabed got saturated, I suppose that would stop it dissipating quite so quickly... hmm. I’ll have a look at the readings to check, but if they’re only a little higher it’s probably just that all that seawater is slowing down the dissipation. Was there anything else?”

Arf nodded. “A couple of spots which were all weird but I couldn’t see why. They were probably what you were looking for, right? And, uh. Fate wanted to tell you this bit.”

“Um, yes.” Fate stepped forward, wringing her hands together. “We found active magic use. Arf and I were patrolling part of the inner city border when Bardiche picked up a faint strain of wide-broadcast unencrypted telepathy. We tracked it to its source at a hospital and called in Nanoha and Vesta before investigating further, then Arf went in as a puppy to see what it was.”

She bit her lip. “It, um... do you remember the hospital Nanoha and I first worked together at? It was there. And, uh, the telepathy was from one of the girls from that time. The pink-haired one. She was trying to talk to a squirrel or a bird or something – she tried talking to Arf, too; I think she was just trying to see if anything would talk back. Though I don’t know how she’d have got the idea that they would.”

Nanoha shifted in a slightly embarrassed way. “It’s an obvious thing to test,” she muttered sulkily.

Linith hummed to herself. “Telepathy is relatively simple,” she mused. “And she did see active magic use when you two were fighting... were there signs of magic use around the hospital? Is she a resident there?”

“I think so,” Arf put in. “She’s been practicing something there, for sure. It smelt like her. The magic, I mean, even if it wasn’t a real smell. And speaking of smelled, she smelt like illness and hospitalness, so I’m pretty sure she’s there a lot.”

“That’s why I was worried,” Fate explained nervously, “because, well, she has magic, even if she’s not any good at it. And... and she’s completely vulnerable. If she was attacked, she might get hurt or... worse.” She squirmed and sped up. “She looked so fragile, and she doesn’t know the danger; not at all. If her magic use hasn’t already drawn their attention, it will soon. So I wanted to warn her, b-but not before checking, and... and I didn’t want to worry Mother about this. She’s already got so many other things to worry about.”

Linith was quiet for a moment; her eyes closed, as she thought. After reaching some internal decision, she opened her eyes and nodded. “Good reasoning,” she complimented, “and good choices, both in your investigation and bringing it to me.” She smiled a little wistfully. “Such a kind girl you are. Alicia is lucky to have a sister as nice as you. Alright, I’ll see what I can do about it. We probably don’t want to contact her in person, since she might recognise you, but an anonymous message might work.”

She patted Fate on the shoulder reassuringly. “We can keep an eye on her, too. Then if the Wolkenritter do attack her, we can jump in and rescue her, and maybe track them back to their master at the same time, hmm? But we can set that up later. For now, let’s go tell Precia you’re back, and have a look at the data on Raising Heart and Bardiche.”

...

The air in the conference room of the Asura smelt lived-in. An archaeological layer of discarded plates laid testament to long nights and overwork. Video windows hung in the air, each showing a different world. The TSAB were spread thin.

Lindy pinched the bridge of her nose, hoping it would fight off the developing headache. “Someone give me good news,” she groaned, casting a longing glance at the empty tea mug that sat beside her on the table.

“"We have twenty nine combat casualties, nine of them KIA and twenty wounded with all the symptoms of linker core draining. On top of that, we have four MIA all from the same squad, suspected dead,” Chrono answered promptly, his communications window floating in front of Lindy. He had bags under his eyes, and his hair was windblown. “Nine of our detector stations are down and we don’t have the personnel or firepower to defend the others. We don’t know who attacked us – though it’s not hard to guess –what they’re planning, or where they are.”

Lindy squeezed her eyes shut. “I said give me _good_ news, Chrono.”

“We’re already blind across more than forty percent of the local volume, and that number is likely to keep increasing,” he shot back bluntly. “And it’s now almost certain that we’re up against the Book of Darkness. There is no good news.” He paused, leaning forwards almost hungrily. “Have Technical managed to extract anything from the Devices?”

Amy shook her head, looking up. “No,” she said. “They’ve been formatted, every last one. All memory, wiped clean. There are micro-punctures on the casing suggesting that the attacker used some kind of filament tool to break in, but,” she spread her hands, “they’re the kind of specialist device you’d use for precision work.”

“I don’t think this matters so much,” Zest said slowly. His link was low resolution. He was light seconds away, getting another sensor station set up. “We’re already treating this as if it’s the Book of Darkness. If it’s just an imposter, an overreaction is safer.” He cleared his throat. “On that note, I had Megane make enquiries at the Infinite Library. Her message arrived a few hours ago.”

“But there’s an eleven hour light lag and we only just...” Amy began.

“I wanted to be prepared,” Zest said simply. “Even if they were pretenders, it’s a useful way of working out what they’re trying to emulate. And there’re still lesser Lost Logia built to work like the Book around, so I told her to enquire about them too. With your permission, admiral? She raises some pertinent points.”

“Wonderful,” Lindy said flatly. She coughed. “Sorry, sorry, the tiredness is getting to me. I meant ‘wonderful! I hope it’s good news!’ Though it’s never been properly studied as a Lost Logia. I can hope Alpine found something useful, but I doubt it.” She sighed and waved a hand. “Go ahead anyway. Anything is better than nothing, at this point.”

“Tell me if there are problems with the connection,” Zest said. “I’m starting the playback now.”

A new window opened. It showed Megane Alpine sitting at a desk, a purple-haired baby dozing in her arms. “Zest,” she said, her tone clipped, “I’ll make this quick because things haven’t been that productive so far. The Infinite Library has not been cooperative – I get the distinct feeling that the classifications on some of the things in there have been raised. Recently, at that. I’m not sure if they’re just being obstructionist out of habit, to cover up the fact that they appear to have the organisational skills of dead woodlice, or because someone wants to block these enquiries.”

Megane narrowed her eyes. “They also got rather uppity about letting me take a small child into the library. I had to put a stop to _that_ nonsense, let me tell you! I don’t think they’ll be a problem there again.”

Chrono and some of the other squad leaders smirked at that remark. Lindy just sighed.

“Get Flotilla Admiral Harlaown to make a formal information request, nominating me as her agent,” Megane continued. “I’m going to need heavier guns to bludgeon my way through these obstructionist wastes of oxygen.” She paused. “And both you and Quint should be careful,” she added, her tone coldly serious. “The things I have been able to access are all case reports and the like. There’s a clear pattern of behaviour in the analyses. The Wolkenritter like dog-piling powerful mages, and the Blade is an S-rank. The Hound and the Breaker are both AAA-rankers, too. You can probably fight them one on one, but they won’t let you if they can avoid it, and their teamwork is very, very good. Do _not_ let them get their hands on you. An AAA-ranker is estimated to be approximately point-five to one percent of their total required energy input for a full Book activation. Let me remind you, none of us want that. _And_ they integrate knowledge from drained targets into their magical styles.”

The baby in her arms made a small snuffling noise, and then sneezed. Megane rocked her child in her arms, and then continued.

“I’ll keep on searching, but I need the extra authorisation to get into certain restricted areas. Get Harlaown to send it. I’ll try my best without it. Alpine out.”

Quint cleared her throat. “She raises a pertinent point,” she observed. “Me and Zest are operating separately at the moment because we don’t have enough people who can do long-distance jumps, but we have to take into consideration that the hostiles might go for us. And if it is a power drainer Lost Logia...”

“Yes, I know,” Lindy said. She sighed. “I’ve been in contact with Admiral Graham, and he’s sending more reinforcements – Air Force units, too – but he’s just had a flare-up over in Bellemay. Unknown hostiles have committed acts of terrorism against military targets, and he’s having to reinforce the area. Even he doesn’t have too many high-end mages to spare, and we need high end ones. Any teams which could be overwhelmed by the Wolkenritter before reinforcements arrive are just feeding it linker cores. Some sensor ships should be here in three days, though, to help patch the grid.”

Chrono frowned. “That’s suspicious timing,” he pointed out. “All the way over in Bellemay? That’s about as far as you can get from us in his sector. It has to be a diversion to prevent him from sending reinforcements.”

Lindy wrapped her hands around her cold empty mug. “He said the same,” she said. “But he can’t do anything about it. Bellemay’s accession treaty dictates we provide external security, in return for them disarming their WMDs. He’s worried that local nationalists might take this as an excuse to rearm if they don’t see we’re willing to stand by them.”

“Passive sensors will have to do,” Zest said, simply. “Next time we’re back, we’ll need to talk about shifting patrol patterns. Is that all?”

Lindy looked around. “Anything else?” she asked her audience.

“Not at my end,” Chrono said. There were shaken heads from the other team leaders. 

“In that case, I’m closing this meeting. Everyone, stay safe,” she said. Cutting the connection, she stood and stretched. Amy rose too.

“I’m just going for a walk,” Lindy told her subordinate. Her hand went to her back. “I’m spending too long sitting down and I’m aching all over. And I need the toilet. If you have any reports that can wait...”

“They can,” Amy said hastily. “I haven’t had time to prepare the summaries; I’ll get right on that!”

Rubbing her eyes, Lindy made her way out of the conference room and nearly tripped over Yuuno Scrya, who was waiting outside.

“Oh, uh, admiral,” the boy said hesitantly, shuffling his feet.

“Please, call me Lindy,” she said. “Yuuno, how long have you been waiting here?”

He coughed in an embarrassed manner. “Um. Quite a while. I didn’t want to disturb you because they said you were very busy, but I wanted to talk to you as soon as possible.”

“Oh?” Lindy asked. “Is it important?” It was perhaps a little cruel to ask that of him when he had clearly been waiting for a long time, but she wanted to hear it from him.”

“It’s very important,” Yuuno insisted. He swallowed, and looked around. “Um... I had a secret telepathic conversation with Momoko Takimachi and... uh, she told me something she didn’t want to tell Heidi. And it seems it’s certain that it’s the Book of Darkness, from what she said.”

Lindy froze. “What?” she said in a little-too-calm voice.

“I’ll let you hear the playback,” Yuuno said, fiddling with his Device. “I recorded it all.

Admiral Harlaown listened to the recording in near silence. The words ‘A book. A glowing book, with a golden cross on the cover,’ drew a gasp from her lips, though. “Are you sure no one mentioned this to her?” she demanded.

Yuuno shook his head. “No. I’m not even sure that Heidi knows what the Book of Darkness looks like. And I didn’t say anything about it.”

“We... we can as good-as treat it as confirmation that this is the Book. There’s no reason they would let a native self-taught mage with no links to the TSAB see that as a deliberate lure – what could they have to gain from it? And that the Blade this incarnation is a pink-haired woman.” She stared at Yuuno. “You should have told me earlier,” Lindy said simply. “With the main report.”

Yuuno shrunk under her stare. That was something which had come up before. He really should have reported this earlier. He could only hope that his tardiness this time would be less severe than when he’d kept secrets from Nanoha. “I wanted to,” he protested, “but I wanted to tell it to you personally. I... I didn’t know how the others would have reacted if they’d heard.”

Lindy tilted her head. “You could be right,” she said, nodding. “Lanster’s squad are still painfully green, and the green-haired one has the personal tie.” She sighed. “Though I do, too,” she admitted. “My husband, Chrono’s father died in the last incident. But... well, I can treat this as business. I’m more worried about Chrono. He was always such a serious child after that, and he’s been certain this was the Book ever since the first reports. I hope he doesn’t get together with Lanster’s girl to plot revenge.”

Yuuno nodded.

Lindy forced out a fake laugh, her brow furrowing. “Maybe I’m just not looking forwards to the ‘I told you so’ he’s going to produce when he finds out,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it. “A pink-haired woman. At least we know what two of our enemies look like now. The two most dangerous in direct combat, too. That might save some lives if we can warn people to retreat from them.” She pursed her lips. “The Wolkenritter are killers to the bone,” she said. “They’re going to kill my men – have probably killed several – and we can’t stop more deaths. All we can do is minimise the harm they do and hopefully stop them before they complete their goal.”

“Admiral,” her XO said, a comms window opening with no preamble, “we have a potential situation.”

“What is it, Zastava?” she asked.

“We’ve just picked up an anomalous teleportation signal from UA-97,” he reported. “Crude – perhaps too crude – and it’s coming right from one of the locations from the Jewel Seed Incident. Nearly right on top of one of the sensors. Site A3. It’s marked as the Tsukimura Estate in the notes.”

“What?” Lindy said. “It’s...” she took a breath, “oh yes, I remember now. That was one of Miss Tachimaki’s friends. Some weak skill, yes?”

“She... uh, that is, Nanoha’s mother might be sort of teaching Nanoha’s friends,” Yuuno offered. “I got some implications of that. And a crude teleport coming from there...”

Lindy massaged her brow. “Get the local team to check it out. But tell them to take care. It’s probably Mrs Takamachi playing around with teleportation, but it might be a trap to lure us out of position. I want a support team prepped for rapid deployment _before_ they go.”

Yuuno rose. “I’d like to go down. She knows me and listened to me last time,” he said hastily.

The admiral took a breath, and let it out. “I don’t see why not,” Lindy said, smiling. “Please do tell her to take care... and probably explain jump safety to her while you’re at it. We don’t want an untrained civilian dumping herself out of atmo.”

Yuuno didn’t dare to hope that maybe Nanoha was there, teaching her mother. That was too much to hope for, and a glimpse of a girl with some passing resemblance to her meant nothing. It couldn’t have been her.

Could it?

...

Alicia was bored.

Bored bored bored.

Booooooooored.

Mama, Linith, Nanoha and Biglittle Sis Fate and their familiars were all talking about boring things in Mama’s room – and they’d warded the door against eavesdropping, which was _totally_ unfair. She hadn’t expected them to take ‘if you didn’t want me to listen, you would have put up wards’ so _seriously_.

And engineer-y man still wouldn’t let her into his workshop, and when she’d gone to tell him that Dollie wanted to look around it as well, he’d been making kissy faces with Mr Bene and had slammed the door when she spoke up. She couldn’t even _find_ the captain or Mrs Sad Metal Sort-Of-Lady. They were probably in the bits of the ship she wasn’t allowed to go into. And she’d had to put her bag of chocolates back in the fridge so they wouldn’t go all melty and yucky.

It was so unfair!

“Dollie!” she announced dramatically, lifting her blue-haired doll up to stare it firmly in the eye. “I think there is a consira... cospiran... a big plan thing to keep us locked up here and bored all the time! What say you?”

She tilted her head, regarding it gravely. “Maybe they’re having fun when they go off on adventures?” she squeaked, nodding the doll’s head in time with the words. Her eyes widened.

“You’re right!” She nodded firmly. “It’s probably because they all want the fun stuff for _themselves_. Like the pudding at school! Or maybe because Mama doesn’t want me to have so much of it.” She wrinkled her nose. “Stupid healthy foods. They taste yucky. Why not give them all to Fate? She _likes_ that sort of thing.”

She frowned and tilted her head again. “Unless... do you remember, Dollie? What Vesta said?”

“Yes, Alicia, I do,” she filled in again, wobbling her toy’s head. “She said that there are all kinds of things which are tasty on Earth. But Alicia, Vesta eats _anything_. Remember your sandal straps?”

“Yes,” she admitted, scowling at that memory. But swiftly she rallied, and argued back; “but also like pudding! And toffee grapes! She was talking about the tasties she’d had!” She gasped, eyes widening, and her hand went to her mouth as she realised the perfidious treachery of her biglittle sister. “ _That’s_ what they're doing! Fate isn’t crazy, she’s just having lots of sweeties when she’s doing stuff away from the ship. So cunning!”

“Well then, Alicia, you know what you must do.” Dollie’s tone dropped a register as Alicia put on the most regal-sounding voice she could. “In the name of Queen Dollie of the Land of Fun Things, you must go forth and find tasty things to eat!” A thought occurred to her, and she momentarily slipped back into her normal tone as she exclaimed “Oh! And also, also, Nanoha’s mummy is down on the planet, and she’s who we’re here to rescue, and she raised Nanoha and Nanoha helped... uh...” She quickly shifted back into Queen Dollie’s voice and cleared her throat, “Nanoha’s mummy raised her, and Nanoha saved you! So you have to go and meet her as well, and say thank you, and find out lots of things about Nanoha so we can get her to let you do things in future! And I’m ordering you to do this as Queen Dollie, so you have to obey, and you can say it’s not your fault if you get caught!”

Alicia nodded firmly. “Right!” She paused. “What would you have done to me if I’d said no?” she asked nervously.

“I would have exiled you from the Fun Kingdom!” Queen Dollie proclaimed to Alicia’s shocked gasp. “Then you would _never be able to have fun again!_ Like Fate!”

“No! Anything but that!” Alicia shivered. “Okay then, in that case I’ll need a Plan.” She pulled out her ever-present notebook and crayon, flipping past the roughly drawn Device schematics and the super-special language she was inventing all from scratch to stop people reading her diary, past doodles of butterflies and fairies until she found a blank page.

‘PLAN FOR GOING DOWN TO HAVE FUN ON EARTH’, she wrote carefully, with only minimal meandering above and below the sentence line. ‘STEP ONE: SNEAK OUT. STEP TWO: FIND EARTH. STEP THREE: GO THERE. STEP FOUR: HAVE FUN.’

She leaned back thoughtfully, chewing on her crayon. ‘STEP FIVE:’ she added after a moment’s contemplation, ‘SNEAK BACK WITHOUT BEING CAUGHT.’

Yes, she decided, looking it over. That seemed fairly straightforward. So, how was she going to sneak out?

Like a Belkan savant-oracle of old, Dollie rose up in the corner of Alicia’s vision; her countenance wise and sagelike, floating in the air unsupported.

... well, okay, she was supported by a minor levitation spell Alicia was casting. But it still looked very dramatic and impressive.

“Alicia!” she said in Dollie’s voice, “I can see that you know how you to sneak out to Earth, because you’re the cleverest girl in the whole of ever!”

“Oh, but Dollie!” she laughed, putting on a high-class accent waving her hand as if flattered. “It’s just an idea, it didn’t take much thought!”

“But it will definitely work!” Dollie assured her. “Like all your plans work, because you’re super-duper smart! You just need to be careful about how you do it.”

“Hmm...” Alicia nodded decisively, and stood, tucking her notebook back into her pocket. “Okay! You’re right, Dollie! I have a plan, and I’m super brilliant so I know how I’m gonna do it! Let’s go!”

Their destination was the teleport room that Nanoha and Fate had arrived in only a few hours earlier. It was, Alicia, knew, set up to make teleporting easier. While she wasn’t totally sure how it did so, she was confident that she’d be able to work it out as she went. And then she could teleport down to the planet and find Nanoha’s mummy, and then get back the same way.

The plan was flawless.

The preoccupation of everyone else on the ship worked to her advantage as she trotted through the corridors, unhindered by any inconvenient adults telling her where she could and couldn’t go. The locked door to the teleport room proved a slightly harder challenge, but fell to some fiddling with the simple electronic lock and a sharp kick to the bottom corner.

Her first actual challenge came in finding the coordinates for UA-97.

“Urgh!” Alicia growled, stamping her foot. “Why won’t you work!” She glared at the computer and brandished her civilian-issue Storage Device again. “Baton, look at the logs and show me the coordinate things for the last teleport from here!”

[Request denied. Authorisation insufficient for access.]

“But I _want_ them!”

[Request denied. Authorisation insufficient for access.]

“Pretty please give me the coordinates?”

[Request denied. Authorisation insufficient for access.]

“How do I _get_ author-thingied, then? I’ve written books!” She flourished her notebook. “See? Give it to me!”

[Insufficient clearance.]

“Rrrrgh!” She stamped her foot again, and winced slightly. Her Jacket might have comfortable shoes, but stamping that hard still sort of hurt her feet. “Hmm. Dollie, any ideas?” She stared at the doll for a while, tapping her lip theatrically. “It’s not giving me the coordinatey-numbers bec...”

[Request denied. Authorisation insufficient for access.]

“Argh, I _know_ , shut _up!_ Urgh. So it’s not giving me them because it’s a meanie and stupid and annoying... maybe if I looked at something else with them? Hmm...” An idea occurred to her, and she brandished her wand anew with a triumphant expression. “Baton! Look at the logs for Nanoha’s scrying and show me the coordinatey-things she was looking at then!”

There was a heartbeat of silence. And then...

[Search complete. Four results located.]

“Yay! Show me the top one!”

The spell wasn’t hard, when she had the room helping her. The inbuilt circuits and arrays lit up as she began the chant, and the casting circle formed almost naturally as she listed off the coordinates. Light exploded around her, rippling and coruscating; she felt a jerk that seemed to tug her whole body at once, a sudden draining feeling, and then...

... and then she was somewhere else.

The transport had not been as smooth as some of the other teleports she’d experienced. Her head was spinning, the world was sort of blurry and spinning in the other direction to the way it felt like her head was going, and she felt sort of sick. Nevertheless, Alicia took stock of her surroundings. There were trees. That was a point she was pretty definitely sure about, even if they were all fuzzy. The sky was, roughly, blue-ish. It was daytime. She was really starting to feel very, very dizzy.

“Uh...” she managed plaintively, and fell over.

After a few moments of communing with the ground and trying not to be sick, she felt something furry and warm nuzzle up against her hand. A croak of “V’sta?” garnered no reply, and after a few seconds, the warm-furry-thing shifted, and she felt four paws tread quite deliberately across her back. A weight settled down on her as the... yes, it was definitely a cat, nothing else trod on people like that... as the cat curled up on the small of her back, and began to purr.

It was curiously comforting, somehow, and the dizziness and nausea slowly faded away as she listened. Once her stomach stopped swirling, she looked over her shoulder at it. It was a fat calico cat, looking supremely content curled up on top of her in a patch of winter sunshine, and staring back at her with the same smug, superior and slightly haughty look of... well, every cat that she’d ever seen in a comfortable position ever. She was pretty sure it was a cat thing, though Vesta and Linith kept dodging her questions about it.

From somewhere above her and a little way off, someone cleared their throat. It was a polite sound, if somewhat confused, and after another second or so the throat-clearer spoke up, sounding a little out of breath.

“... well. Hello there,” they said. “This is a little unexpected.” Alicia could hear the slight double-noise of the translation, and the words in the background sounded like Nanoha when she wasn’t speaking a proper language.

Wriggling round to see who it was, Alicia managed to scoop the calico off her back and onto her lap as she sat up. She _was_ surrounded by trees, like she’d thought, in some sort of little wood. Yes! Fresh air! And a proper blue sky! The owner of the voice was standing next to a bush nearby, looking at her. She was an older lady, and looked like just been running or something, with flushed cheeks and a few bits of greenery caught in her clothes. There were two girls behind her, one with blonde hair a bit darker than Fate’s, one with purple hair a lot brighter than Mama’s, both looking confused and wary and a little bit scared. But Alicia didn’t care about them. She was focused on the lady. She had brown hair a bit lighter than Nanoha’s, and blue eyes a lot like Nanoha’s, and...

Alicia’s eyes widened. “No way...” she whispered to herself. Then whooped. “Hah! I really am awesome! I’m the bestest of best planners _ev_ \- ow!”

She was interrupted as the calico – which apparently wasn’t fond of its napping spots moving around under it, grabbing it under its stomach and making sudden loud noises – clawed at her arm, twisted out of her grip and disappeared off into the undergrowth.

Woman and girl stared at one another in silence as wind ruffled through the trees.

“Are you Nanoha’s mummy?” Alicia asked, after a moment. “Because you look a lot like her, and she was looking around here not long ago, and I came here to talk to you if you are, because I wanted to say thank you for Nanoha saving me, because she said that you were a big part of who she is and stuff.”

Momoko blinked. “Nanoha... saving you? Oh!” She quickly crossed the distance to Alicia and knelt down to her level, looking over her searchingly. “Oh my... you’re the spitting image of your sister, from what I’ve seen of her.” She smiled. “Yes, I’m Momoko. And I’m... I’m glad Nanoha speaks so highly of me. Though you know, she more or less raised herself. I’m not sure how much we had to do with it.” Her eyes got a little watery, but she kept smiling. “She’s an amazing girl, my daughter. I’m sure she’s been taking good care of you. But I don’t think you’ve introduced yourself to me yet, have you?”

“Oh, right!” Alicia bobbed a quick bow. “My name is Alicia Testarossa, daughter of Precia Testarossa. I’m very pleased to meet you!”

Momoko laughed. “Well I’m Momoko Takamachi, daughter of Haruki Takamachi. And I’m very pleased to meet you too. But if I might ask, how did you get here? I felt a magical discharge, were you trying a spell? Where are the others? Is... is Nanoha with you?”

“Huh?” Alicia blinked up at her. “No, I came on my own with the teleport room! I wanted to see Earth, ‘cause Biglittle Sis Fate and Nanoha and Arf and Vesta keep coming here and having fun and doing stuff and they always say I can’t come, and I wanted to meet you and say thank-you and everything, and Dollie told me to!” She offered Dollie as evidence for this last, secure in her credentials, and missed the way that Momoko paled.

“Alicia,” she asked gently, “did you make sure the spell wouldn’t get caught by detectors? Because it was very... loud.”

Alicia blinked at her in a way that Momoko recognised, with a dawning sense of horror. It was the fixed, blank expression of a child who; upon being asked about something they had absolutely no knowledge about, had resolved to not give any indication as to their ignorance whatsoever. It was an expression she had seen frequently as the mother of three children.

Which meant that the teleport had been completely unhidden. And if _she_ had felt it...

Momoko sprung to her feet and grabbed Alicia’s hand. She looked for Suzuka and Arisa and found them, already beside her. Arisa looked worried.

“We need to leave,” said Momoko, as much to reassure herself and the girls with a concrete plan as to inform Alicia of what it was. “Right now. Suzuka, what’s the fastest route to the bus stop?”

Suzuka didn’t bother wasting time with an answer. She pointed, and set off at a sprint. Alicia began to ask a question, but Momoko bundled the girl into her arms and took off after her in a dead run.

...

Fate was keening as they arrived on the Tsukimura grounds; her eyes wide, her face pale. Alicia was in danger – immediate, lethal danger – and Nanoha could tell she was on the verge of a panic attack. Precia had, if anything, been worse. She gripped Fate’s hand tightly, willing her to remain calm. Linith kept a steadying hand on her other shoulder, while Arf and Vesta remained on alert; silent, watchful and prepared for anything. All five of them wore their anonymised jackets, and were on full alert.

“Raising Heart, sweep the house,” ordered Nanoha. “See if Alicia’s here.”

[Area Search]

The balls of pink light exploded out, rapidly and efficiently flitting through the grounds and the house to seek out any signs of life. It only took a moment for the results to return.

[Search negative. Three people present, my master. None match search parameters.]

Linith hissed through her teeth. “She must have run off somewhere. Alright, don’t worry, we can still find her. She still has Baton. Fate, Nanoha, can you track it?”

“Bardiche?” asked Fate.

[Yes sir. Tracking target. Locked on.]

“Let’s go, then.” Linith’s usual warmth and lightheartedness was gone. She was all business now, efficiency and competence personified. It made Nanoha feel a little better to have her there with them.

Angling for the trace of Alicia’s Device, they took off skywards and headed out.

A few kilometres away, the subject of their search was still remarkably unconcerned by it. Perched on Momoko’s lap between Arisa and Suzuka, Alicia was happily chattering away at full speed, oblivious to the tension in the air. Despite her worry, Momoko couldn’t help but be drawn into her easy cheerfulness a little. She wasn’t too worried about people overhearing. Alicia was at the age where it would no doubt be taken as nothing but an overactive imagination.

“... and Nanoha told me about your kind of school, but I think she might have been fibbing about some of it. All your sports sound really boring, and... oh! Oh! Do you know how to play Barrierball? It’s really fun! And do you really have to take your shoes off in school? Because that just sounds silly to me. I mean, you don’t even have Jackets, so it’s not like you can just change it, you have to totally take your shoes off and put a new pair on!”

She paused to take a breath, which Momoko had honestly been starting to wonder about, and continued without waiting for answers. “Oh! And what’s with the bowing? Because Fate said Nanoha did that a few times at the start of school on Schzenais, and then got really embarrassed when nobody else did. Hee hee! It was actually pretty funny. I think she got a little bit teased for it at first, but then they had magic practice and she did better than, like, anyone else in the _whole class_ even though they were meant to be being all secret about how good they were.”

Casting furtive looks to either side, Alicia leaned in close to Arisa. “Honestly, I don’t think she’s very good at the hiding-how-good-she-is thing,” she confided in a loud whisper. “She’s sort of a poor loser. She gets all upset when I beat her at Barrierball and accuses me of cheating, even though it’s _my_ game.”

Despite the worry and fear of pursuit, Arisa couldn’t fight back a snort of laughter at that. “No change there, then,” she said, snickering. “Don’t worry, she’s always been like that.”

“I knew it!” Alicia bounced happily on Momoko’s lap, restrained only by the hands around her waist. “Vesta always says Nanoha’s bad at sneaky, too, and that that’s what she’s for. Oh! And is it true you eat chocolate with every meal?”

Suzuka blinked in confusion. “Um, wait, what?” she asked. “Where did you hear that?”

“Uh...” Alicia looked briefly thoughtful. “... I guess nowhere? But I know chocolate comes from here, and it’s _so yummy_ that I bet I’d eat it all the time if I could.”

“I don’t think that would be very healthy, dear,” Momoko pointed out, biting back a smile. Alicia shrugged unconcernedly.

“I’d manage.”

Amused, Momoko began to answer, but she was interrupted before she could by a pulse from behind them. She paled, turning to awkwardly look out of the bus’s back window. It wasn’t visible; they’d left Suzuka’s home too far behind to be caught by it. But the sensation was unmistakeable.

Someone had just cast a dimensional barrier.

A quick glance to either side confirmed that Arisa and Suzuka had felt it as well, though if Alicia had, she was ignoring it.

She stood abruptly, sliding Alicia off her lap and grabbing her by the hand. “Come on,” she ordered curtly. “We’re getting off at the next stop.” Alicia protested a little, but followed obediently as Momoko shuffled down to the side door and leaned on one of the poles to steady herself.

“Shouldn’t we stay on the bus?” asked Suzuka. Momoko shook her head.

“No. This route has a lot of stops, and goes through a couple of residential areas. Lots of turns and backtracking; it doesn’t cover distance well.” She examined the route map on one of the partition walls next to the exit. “We can take the... hmm, let’s see... yes, the 54 city route. That’s going in the right direction, looks like it’ll be arriving in just a minute, and it gets us away from here quickly. And,” she added darkly, “it means we’re not on this bus anymore, just in case something back at your house got the licence plate.”

The girls nodded obediently, and Momoko closed her eyes, thinking for anything else she might have missed. “Oh!” she muttered, as something occurred to her. “Alicia, do you have a Device?” she asked quietly, and smiled fondly at Alicia’s proud nod. “Well, there are rules about cell phones and that sort of thing on the public transport system, so can I ask you to turn it off for a little while? Look, see, I’m turning off mine.”

“But I can’t speak your language without Baton!” Alicia objected. Momoko pursed her lips.

“Well... you can turn it on once we’ve got to where we’re going. But just for now, please turn it off and stay close to me, okay? It’s important to follow the rules when you’re using the bus system, or you can end up in trouble.”

Alicia pouted some more, but eventually capitulated with a melodramatic sigh, and pulled out her little wand-rod to deactivate it. Momoko had already quietly deactivated her own. Suzuka and Arisa seemed confused, but she waved their questioning looks off, concentrating hard. Devices were advanced technology, and she didn’t understand much about them, but if she was right...

... yes, there it was. A very faint pulse, a sonar-like ping of magic. She was willing to bet that whatever was coded into that subtle signal, it would be calibrated to get a TSAB Device to respond. At that point, it didn’t really matter whether it was the TSAB doing it, or the things from the Book. Either would be disastrous if they found Alicia.

She hustled the girls off the bus and onto the next as it pulled up, paying distractedly, and lapsed back into thought as they pulled away from the stop. Alicia was trying some badly mispronounced Japanese words that she’d probably picked up from Nanoha, but Momoko let the girls handle her.

They needed to keep moving, but buses weren’t going to work forever. If she could get them home, though... no, the TSAB would probably have the licence plate for her car. Perhaps if she could get them to the train station? A quick trip out of town for the day, and come back when everything had calmed down. Alicia was here on her own, but her mother and sister would probably realise she was missing soon, if they hadn’t come after her already.

Should they have stayed at the Tsukimura’s? No, no, she’d felt the barrier going up behind them. She debated trying a wide-broadcast telepathic message to Nanoha, but... no, that would certainly be picked up by everyone chasing them, and give away that Nanoha was alive to boot.

So distracted was she by thought that she almost – _almost_ – missed the wave that rippled over her, and the telltale dimming of the ambient light. But her senses were screaming at her before the barrier finished settling, and she was on her feet even as the shadowy silhouettes of the other passengers faded from sight.

“No...” she whispered, her face going pale. The bus had been paused at a set of traffic lights – which was probably a good thing, Momoko didn’t think she wanted to know what would have happened had it been moving at speed when the barrier pulled them in – and they were somewhere downtown, though nowhere she recognised offhand.

“Oh no, no no no no no...” she muttered, dragging them up again and shouldering the doors open. They were out in the middle of the street. That was the first thing that had to change; they were too visible as it was.

“Arisa, Suzuka, stay close,” she ordered. “We need to get under cover, so we can’t be seen by anyone overhead. Where’s... ah. Alicia, come here.” She made beckoning gestures, and Alicia broke into a trot to keep up as the quartet made for the nearest shop entrance. “Now, we need to...”

Alicia frowned as she followed. She hadn’t really minded the trip, though she’d not been entirely clear on what it was for. Now, though, they were in a barrier. Which was... worrying, given that Earth didn’t have any magic. And it was beginning to dawn on her that Momoko’s comment about stealth measures in her teleport might have meant... like, hiding it from people. And they _were_ here to fight the Book of Darkness.

All in all, she was starting to suspect that maybe, just maybe, she’d made a bit of a mistake. Just a teeny weeny one.

Momoko was talking; fast and low and anxious, as she pulled them towards one of the storefronts. Alicia glanced back at the bus – yup, they were definitely not on it anymore – and quietly thumbed Baton on again so that she could understand what the woman was saying. Before she could parse more than a few words, though...

 _‘Alicia!’_ It was Fate, and she sounded like she was panicking. _‘Alicia, are you alright? Are you hurt? Where are you?’_

 _‘I’m okay, I’m okay!’_ Alicia replied quickly. _‘I think I’m somewhere in town. With Nanoha’s mummy. And her two friends. And we’re in a barrier! I think... I think something’s wrong, Nanoha’s mummy is looking worried, and... um... I think my teleport wasn’t sneaky or something?’_ She gulped nervously. _‘I just wanted to look around!’_ she defended, _‘I didn’t mean it! It wasn’t...’_

 _‘Okay Alicia, just... calm down.’_ Nanoha sounded tense, but controlled. _‘Stay where you are. We’ll trace Baton and come and get you. Is... is my mum okay? And Suzuka and Arisa?’_

_‘They’re fine. Your mum says we have to hide in one of the shops so people don’t spot us. Her Device isn’t turned on though.’_

_‘Alright, Alicia.’_ Linith broke into the channel. _‘Tell her we’re on our way, and that we’ll have you out of there shortly. We’ll be talking about why you came later, but for now let’s just focus on getting back.’_

_‘Okay. See you soon, I hope.’_

The mental presence of the trio faded, and Alicia hurried a couple of steps forward to catch up from where she’d been lagging behind. “Nanoha’s mummy!” she said, tugging on the woman’s dress. “I’m meant to tell you...”

A violent gust of wind ruffled her hair, and Momoko froze rigid, so quickly and without warning that Alicia bumped into her. “Ow!” she complained, craning her head around to see what had made the woman stop so suddenly. “What was that... for?”

There was a lady standing in the street, a little way away from them. From her pose, she’d just landed from flight. She had pink hair in a ponytail, a reddish-pink tunic with a white overcoat and a plate-armoured skirt, and a sword.

Just looking at her set off every warning alarm in Alicia’s brain, and a few more besides.

“Go!” shouted Momoko, terror on her face. “Take her and run!” She pulled her Device out, activating it and shifting it into its staff form in one smooth movement. “ _Go!_ ”

Apparently she was speaking more to Arisa and Suzuka than to Alicia, because after a second’s hesitation they each grabbed one of her hands and began to tug her away at a stumbling run. “Hey... hey, wait!” she protested. “Wait, we have to help her! We have to...”

A series of stuttering cracks and a short cry behind them interrupted her. Wrenching an arm free of Arisa, Alicia turned to see. Momoko was crumpled on the ground. Fading reddish-pink light marked the dissolving remains of half a dozen shooting spells.

The swordswoman was completely unharmed. She hadn’t even drawn her weapon from its sheath. She advanced on Alicia with all the brisk, dispassionate, implacable efficiency of an executioner.

Alicia screamed. Beneath her blouse, the Jewel Seed lodged in her chest flared violet-white, and her eyes blazed with it.

And Dollie, held tight in one hand, exploded.

What emerged from the child’s toy wasn’t even remotely like its source. It was huge and bright and formless, a blob of shadow-matter that grew and extended out from the tiny doll-shape Alicia clutched like a snake with a child clutching its tail. It reminded Arisa and Suzuka of the paper dragon that they’d seen Nanoha fight, six months ago, in a situation oh-so-horribly-similar to this one. But where that monster had been formed from something physical, this one was straight from a child’s nightmare, given form by raw desperation and terror.

It also emerged at about the same speed as a train.

The swordswoman didn’t have time to dodge. She barely had time to react. She’d been a few short metres away when the _Thing_ emerged, and even Fate would have been hard-pressed to dodge with so little time. As it was, she had her still-sheathed sword halfway into a guard position when the mass slammed into her mercilessly and sent her hurtling halfway down the street. Then it reared up, wriggling and shifting as it took on a more defined form.

It was worm-like, with the bulky, bloated body trailing back and thinning until it merged with its source. It was huge; several metres long and easily the mass of a car. Its hide looked like thick fabric in bright shades of blue and white, and it had two huge, red, button-like eyes on the far end. A vicious set of jagged teeth dominated most of its head.

Alicia screamed again, louder this time, and the worm-thing screamed with her. It bared jaws that put sharks to shame and let loose an ear-piercing shriek. The sound cut through Alicia’s own crying, and she stared up at the thing in awe.

Movement caught her attention as the swordswoman got back to her feet, and the worm reacted. It shrieked a second time as Alicia’s eyes widened in fear and coiled down low to put itself between the woman and her.

“What the...”

Movement again, this time from the rooftops. A burly man with a spear, whose eyes flickered between the worm and the swordswoman. The worm shifted positions, covering both angles, waiting for one of them to move.

The swordswoman broke the stalemate first. Her sword left her scabbard in a blur, followed by a gout of flame that struck the worm full on in the jaws. The fabric caught light as she dashed forward, aiming to get around it, but a bulge rocketed out of its side to intercept her. The eyes and jaws retracted into the body of the thing as if they’d never been there, snuffing out the flames as they went. Then they exploded out from the side-tendril to snap at her with steel-rending force. The teeth barely missed her as she sprang backwards, and what had formed the head of the construct shifted back into the main mass as the new face reared back up to take its place.

Almost immediately, it swayed backwards to avoid a brown blur that smashed into the pavement hard enough to crater it; bending and lengthening gracefully like a swan’s neck. The spearman disengaged from his missed lunge before it could snap at him, orange javelins forming around him, and the swordswoman socketed her swordhilt and scabbard together to reconfigure them into a bow. Unwilling to get too close to something that could bite from any portion of its body, the two attackers began to pelt it from range, beginning to strike home as they filled the air with too many projectiles for it to dodge. But whatever substance it was formed from was tough, and though mana spewed from the rents and holes in its hide, the construct didn’t fall.

Some way behind them the developing fight, and unnoticed by the girls watching it, a blonde boy landed further down the street. Yuuno’s eyes darted over the conflict with concern, and he brought up a quartet of shields around himself reflexively, but it wasn’t until he found the source of the monstrous construct and saw the light that glowed around her and burned in her eyes that he felt real fear.

He recognised that light.

He recognised that light all too well.

And he recognised the girl producing it, too. He didn’t know what a Jewel Seed activating right on top of her would do, but he didn’t want to find out. The light seemed to be coming _from_ her; surely Precia hadn’t...

He shook himself free of that line of thought, clearing his mind of any and all speculation. There would be time for that later – time for Nanoha later. If Alicia Testarossa was here, his glimpse of Nanoha a few days ago might not have been as imaginary as he’d thought. Extending his hands and prompting his glove-Device into activity, he formed a casting circle around himself as quietly and subtly as possible. He spent a few seconds to reinforce a sealing spell as much as he could, and then gestured. A green beam of light, no thicker than a finger, sped through the air towards the young girl. Proximity alone would seal the Jewel Seed, and he sighed in relief as the worm failed to notice the shot; too focused on the immediate threats in front of it. The beam caught her in the back, wrapped around to the Jewel Seed in her chest, and clamped down.

She dropped like a doll with cut strings.

There was no cry of pain, no scream of sign of discomfort. One moment she was moving, shrieking, urging her creation on. The next, she simply crumpled, limp and lifeless. Her head bounced once on the pavement, and she lay deathly still. The monstrous worm evaporated, dissolving into formless motes of light and leaving only the doll from which it had come in her hands.

For a split second, as Yuuno’s eyes widened in horror, all was silent. It was as though the very world had paused in shock.

Then, with a telepathic scream of rage heard by all and sundry, something smashed into Yuuno’s shields hard enough to shatter three of them outright and hurl him, inner shield and all, clean through the row of shops behind him. He heard a thunderous retort echo across the city as he flew, dizzied and stunned by the sudden impact. An explosion?

No, a sonic boom. His eyes widened as he put two and two together.

Crackling electric death scythed in, and it was only panic-fuelled adrenaline that let him raise a shield in time to take the flurry of golden blades. Another round of explosions echoed out as they detonated, flinging him – already off-balance and reeling – back into another shop façade. He hastily snapped up another layer of defences, wary of a third volley.

But none came. No, he realised, of course not. Fate wouldn’t be after him, not past that initial, furious retaliation to get him away from her sister. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if she tried to kill him _later_ , given her psychological profile, but at the moment her priority would be...

The sounds of magical combat exploded from the next street over. Zest. The Blade. Fate. And an innocent girl at ground zero, incapacitated by his own actions.

Yuuno bit back a curse, and dived forward.

...

It was chaos.

Still crackling with the speed boost that had broken the sound barrier, Fate flung wave after wave of yellow bolts at the spearman and swordswoman with the frantic desperation that could only come from terror. Her arms were a blur of movement as Bardiche spun and cycled through shooting patterns, trying to keep her enemies at bay through sheer volume of fire. To her side, Arf hugged Alicia to her, checking the girl’s vitals and readying herself for the inevitable retaliation.

It came suddenly and without warning. The figure of the swordswoman punched through the hail of fire with some sort of speed move, accepting a few hits to close to melee. Her sword came down in an overhand blow. Fate brought Bardiche up to block, the axe flickering with orange light as Arf reinforced and anchored it. Once she’d stopped the blow, she could anchor it with a bind or...

The impact resonated through her arms all the way down to her feet, and had she not been firmly planted it would have thrown her off her feet. The woman was far too strong, and Fate reeled back as her instincts and training screamed warnings at her. It was like blocking Zest!

She managed to parry the next few blows as Arf renewed the reinforcements around Bardiche – fast, fast, _fast_ , the woman was making her work to keep up. A feint and deflection slipped through her guard, and though an orange chain stopped it before it got too far, she still skidded backwards with a bleeding cheek. That had been spalling _through_ her barrier jacket! Range, she needed range. Mother had been right; this woman was a monster in melee, beyond anything she’d faced before.

And then the Blade spun with preternatural speed to deflect a spearhead aimed at her heart from behind. A shower of sparks flashed out from the crash of steel on steel, and her sword became a blur as Zest pressed her backwards, exploiting his range advantage for all it was worth. Leaping backwards to avoid a twisting strike that clipped a two-inch gash into a streetlamp, she went airborne, exploding upwards into the sky. With a rush of air and a volley of javelins forming around him, Zest followed her.

Fate sighed in relief. Hopefully they would keep each other occupied long enough for her to get Alicia away. _‘Arf, is she...’_ she trailed off. Her familiar nodded.

_‘She’s alive. The mechanism still has some charge left. I don’t know how to unseal the Seed, though. And I don’t know why she’s unconscious.’_

Fate exhaled. _‘She’s alive, that’s good enough. Linith will know what to do.’_ Fate glanced across at Nanoha’s mother and friends. The girls were huddled next to a couple of TSAB cadets she vaguely recognised from the Jewel Seed Incident. One of them was crouched over Momoko; healing magic flowing into the woman from her hands. She glanced up, feeling Fate’s eyes on her patient, and nodded a brief reassurance before returning to her task.

Defending them was the Scrya boy.

Something of what Fate was feeling must have shown on her face, because he flinched even from behind half a dozen layers of shielding. She glared harder. He’d done this. He’d attacked Alicia. She wouldn’t forget, and she’d never forgive.

But right now, her sister was more important.

 _‘Let’s go,’_ she said to Arf.

But before they could make a move for the skies, a flurry of purple needles forced them to duck for cover behind the cars sitting empty in the street. Arf snarled, and Fate’s lips tightened. Where... ah. The second TSAB cadet. She was boxing them in, trying to stop them from taking off. Had it been Fate alone, she’d have ignored the shots – the girl’s shooting had improved since the last time, but Fate was still confident her Barrier Jacket could take a few seconds of it.

Alicia, though...

 _‘Barrier,’_ she ordered Arf curtly, rolling away from her cover as needles arced over it and pelted the tarmac where she’d been sitting a few seconds ago. _‘Around Alicia. We’ll soak this and break through.’_

A wordless affirmative. And then panic, as the hail of needles petered out.

Fate moved like lightning, abandoning the Photon Lancers she’d been setting up for a return volley and burning a quick Blitz Action to vault up from behind her current car towards her familiar. Anything enough to cause that panic and prompt the TSAB cadet to stop firing couldn’t possibly be good news.

It wasn’t.

A dark-skinned man, white-haired and unarmed save for the metal gauntlets he wore, was facing off with Arf. Her familiar snarled, but Fate could see the hesitation in her. To attack would mean to drop Alicia, leaving her defenceless. At the same time, if the man attacked her, the burden of carrying Alicia would slow her down and hamper in defending herself. Fate put a name to the assailant even as she launched herself in to intervene.

The Hound.

He let her get close, smiling. That was her first warning, and it was borne out as she feinted and slashed in at his side, switching Bardiche to scythe mode in mid-movement to throw him off. It didn’t even come close to working. He ignored the feint completely, slid backwards half a step and brought a gauntlet up to deflect the glowing scythe blade, then moved in with a punch that would have knocked all the breath out of her body. She danced back, drawing him away from Arf and Alicia, and he followed with amusement clear on his face.

Arf shot him thrice in the back as soon as he turned away.

The amusement vanished as if it had been a bad dream. With a snarl that called to mind his title, the Hound swept a hand back, sending a row of white spikes bursting from the ground towards the familiar, blocking her view of him and forcing her to break off her attack or be skewered. Without waiting to see the results of his spell, he lunged at Fate. Metal rang out against metal as he hammered her guard; testing, assessing her skill with the polearm as she took his measure in turn.

He was good. He was very, very good. The added reach of her weapon barely seemed to faze him at all. He moved around it like liquid, dodging most of her blows and deflecting those he couldn’t with his gauntlets. And he struck back. One, then two, then three punishing blows landed, each one sending her tumbling back across the street and forcing her to scramble away from the follow-up blows. Her body ached from the impacts, which were bruising even through a Barrier Jacket. And his attacks were so hard to read, with barely any warning at all.

She wasn’t made for this kind of fight, her best hope against an opponent like this was to disengage and assault him from range.

But if she tried that, he would turn on Arf. And on Alicia. Eyes narrowed, Fate searched for deeper reserves, and kept fighting. Tan light flickered almost imperceptibly around her, and she felt a surge of strength filling her limbs. Silently, she thanked Linith. She just had to hold out a little longer and then Linith could get Alicia out of here.

[Lightning Charge]

The black metal of Bardiche crackled, golden arcs of electricity racing along its length, and now the Hound began to wince as he blocked and deflected what he couldn’t avoid. He scowled and advanced, ignoring the jolting pain where Bardiche scored hits, forcing Fate back with heavy hammer blows and rapid lunges inside her guard. Breaking past the line of spikes, Arf came to her rescue, wrapping a chain around his neck and yanking him backwards. But instead of breaking it or firing at her, he leaned back, grabbed the orange chain, and _pulled_.

Caught completely off-guard by the tactic, Arf was yanked away from her position guarding Alicia and sent tumbling across the ground towards him. He turned to meet her, readying a blow that would put her out of the fight for good, and Fate leapt to her familiar’s defence with a scythe blow aimed for his neck.

Except it never got there.

A chain of blades whipped down from above; sword-segments connected by a flexible whip-like cord. It glanced off Bardiche, sending the blade sideways enough that it bounced off the Hound’s jacket. He ignored it, slamming a fist into Arf’s prone form that drew a cry of pain from her.

But it didn’t put her out of the fight. Orange shards cracked around his fist, and she gave a feral grin as the reactive barrier over her midsection discharged, bathing his forearm in fire. He snarled in pain and jumped back, joining the swordswoman, who snapped her weapon back into its blade form. Her skirt was rent, there was a long diagonal score going from shoulder to hip across her armour and her leg was bleeding, but there was no pain on her face. She exchanged a single glance with her partner, communicating by instinct as much as by high-speed telepathy.

Then they moved as one.

Fate fell back under an onslaught. The Hound had cast something – spikes, perhaps – at where Alicia lay, forcing Arf to jump to her defence. She didn’t begrudge her familiar that; Alicia was more important. But it gave both Wolkenritter a few crucial seconds to focus on her.

She fled. It was the only way to survive. Against the whirling sword and those terrible fists, she knew of nothing that could stand its ground unbroken. Something exploded at their feet, a trap spell of some sort. The Hound broke it like glass, and the Blade darted in. Bardiche screeched in protest as she blocked, each impact jarring her arms and sending pangs of pain through her bones. She threw herself into a Blitz Action to get away. It gave her less than a second of breathing space before she had to cast another, and then a third; the two pursuing her with the terrible implacability of a tsunami.

And it still wasn’t enough. Five or six seconds on the retreat, and then an explosion fired within the blade and the flames around it flared. It crashed down on Bardiche, and the glowing scythe-blade...

... shattered.

The force of the blow ripped the Device out of her hands and split the anonymous outer layer of her Barrier Jacket, sending her tumbling back, her face bare, in only her usual lightweight Jacket. The Hound moved in, but Fate made no move to block. She just stared, numb with shock, the shattered light replaying in her mind’s eye as the fist came down.

Green light flared. Wavered. Held.

Time sped back up, and Fate snapped back to reality. She didn’t waste time thinking about the barrier. Scrabbling round, she dove for Bardiche, smoking and charred from the flames, the scythe output ruined. She grabbed it, shifting it back into its axe mode, and came up ready to guard...

No. _No_.

Their assault on her had been calculated; a blitzkrieg action to focus their offense and take her down before moving onto the others. That had failed. But the second aim hadn’t. She’d been occupying the Hound’s attention, keeping him away from Alicia. But her desperate retreat had taken her halfway down the street, and now the two of them were arrowing towards Arf with terrible speed.

“No!” she screamed, and _moved_. Pouring on speed, she felt the wind lash at her face as the shops to either side of her blurred. The distance to Arf evaporated, but it was going to be close. Arf would have to hold out for a few crucial seconds and...

And then white light lashed up from the ground, directly in front of her. At the speed she was moving, there was no way for her to avoid it, no way for her to dodge around. She hit the binding trap at full speed and stuck, caught like a fly in amber, unable even to struggle.

The Hound stopped his flight as naturally as if he were pausing for coffee, and turned back to her. He wasn’t smiling, not anymore. But something about his satisfied expression made her long to have her scythe free. Except... her scythe was broken, wasn’t it?

The Blade carried on. Towards Arf.

Towards Alicia.

...

Suzuka quailed.

She didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t know who everyone was. She was very confused about who everyone attacking each other were. All she did know was that she was stuck in a nightmare she couldn’t wake up from, and it kept getting worse.

Momoko was stirring, though the medic who’d pulled her out of the line of fire pressed down gently on her chest, keeping her from getting up. There was blood all over her face, but it was coming from a gash on her scalp. Alicia was still lying motionless where she’d collapsed. The boy who’d shot her was hovering nearby, and Suzuka was of half a mind to attack him. Except... he was defending them, his barriers absorbing the occasional stray shot that came their way. His friend, the huge woman with the rifle-like staff, was shooting at the swordswoman. Just whose side were they on?

She recognised the blonde girl with the scythe. Fate. Nanoha’s friend. Alicia’s sister. She was terrifyingly good. Suzuka hadn’t even been able to follow her battle with the white-haired man and the pink-haired swordswoman. But now she was caught, trapped in a lattice of white spikes that held her fast, and the swordswoman was advancing on Fate’s familiar. Everything had gone wrong. Everything was still going wrong. They were going to die here, all of them, at the hands of these monsters.

Arf met the pink-haired woman with a clash and a roar, sending a volley of Photon Lancers that she dodged effortlessly and following it with a flung barrier that the swordswoman split in half with an overhand strike. Chains shot in at her from either side, but her sword flickered from side to side, diverting them, and she lunged for Arf’s chest with viper-like speed.

Green light turned it aside. The boy – Yuuno, Suzuka corrected herself, at least according to Momoko. The swordswoman didn’t seem deterred by the extra opponent, pulling back as a complex web of fine lines lunged at her from his casting circle, seeking her sword. She denied them the chance, sheathing it quickly and shifting her stance to face him.

[Rauchenzwielicht!]

Flames roared, and Suzuka screamed. Yuuno reacted quickly, shifting his shields to the front and slanting them to one side to deflect the firestorm rather than take it head on. There was surprisingly little heat, though. Just the bright gout of fire, obscuring everything behind it. The pavement to her left vanished under the brief wall of flame, which faded into a murky cloud of opaque smoke. But Suzuka could still see down the street to her right, where Fate hung trapped. The man who’d drained her was already pulling out a glowing tome to do the same to Fate.

And Suzuka realised there was something she could do after all.

Grabbing Momoko’s Device from the pavement and ignoring the startled yelp from the sniper-woman, she took a deep breath. Running through the hard-learned maths for one of the few spells she’d showed any skill for, she pointed the staff at her target, and whispered.

“Energy Vampire.”

Power. Power power _power_. Knowing she wasn’t all that good at magic, she’d aimed not at scary man, but at the binding spell he’d used to trap Fate. Now, more magic than she’d ever gathered in her life flooded into her, making her cry out at the sheer volume of it. This... this was the kind of thing Nanoha threw around casually? It scared her, even as she gritted her teeth and pulled harder, leeching mana from the spell matrix, weakening it so that Fate could get away. She wasn’t free, not yet. But the steel grip on her arms loosened enough for her to wrench one free, swinging her broken scythe around and forcing the glowing tome away.

The man backed up. Turned, looking for the source of the interference. Frowned.

Suzuka barely noticed. The magic was starting to hurt, starting to _burn_ , and the numbers were getting harder to focus on. She couldn’t control this much and she knew it, even with the Device’s help. Trembling from the amount of power she was struggling to hold in check, she latched onto the first spell she could think of, and cried out again, switching her aim as best she could from the trap spell to its creator.

“Shoot Barret!”

A shooting spell erupted from the end of the Device, singing her fingers as it went. It wasn’t like the shaped, guided, compressed bullets and blades that the other mages had been throwing around by the dozen. It was a diffuse blob that fell apart even as it travelled, leaving a trail behind it like a comet. It was losing enough energy as light to make it painfully bright. It streaked down the street and the dark-skinned man– perhaps as a reflex, perhaps out of caution – leapt out of the way. The spell smashed into the lower left hand side of the binding lattice, shattering it and freeing Fate’s leg. Given yet more room to manoeuvre, she swung Bardiche at the other side, working her way loose as the man darted back in to stop her.

The street exploded.

Even from a distance, the blast threw Suzuka off her feet. She actually felt the ground shake from the impact. Though she turned instinctively to see what had caused it, all she saw was a brown blur emerge from a crater, which resolved into a human form that blazed with orange light as it slammed into the swordswoman.

It was the spearman. And he looked angry. His coat was tattered in a couple of places, and his hair looked singed, but it was obvious that the woman hadn’t beaten him before returning here. Sword and spear blurred, and the air filled with the sound of clashing metal as, for the first time, _she_ was pushed back under a relentless assault. Spinning to deflect a thrust with her forearm below the spearhead and ducking as it pulled back and across at her neck, she sprung backwards as her comrade came in to cover her.

The spearman charged.

With a sudden explosion of force and speed, he flew forward, clotheslining the scary wolf-man in midair with his spearhaft as he brought it round for another thrust. The swordswoman jumped again, taking to the air. A muffled retort sounded from her Device, and it burst into flame as she swung down, meeting the rising spearhead with a crash and an explosion of fire that forced Suzuka to blink sunspots out of her eyes.

When her vision cleared, they were gone, though the crashes and crackle of flames was enough to tell they hadn’t gone far. More importantly, Fate was crouching over her sister with Arf, helping gather the girl into her familiar’s arms. She glanced at the wolf-man, already picking himself up from where he’d been flung, and looked desperately to the sky.

_‘Nanoha! Get us out of here!’_

...

_‘Give me a little longer!’_ Nanoha mentally yelled, ducking back just in time from a screaming red bullet. The Breaker might not be able to see her, but she was uncannily good at working out where Nanoha was despite her handicap.

And the sky’s other occupants weren’t making it any easier.

She poured on a burst of speed, darting upwards as the red-clad Breaker homed in on her. Vesta could cloak both of them now, but her range was still limited, and the pink motes Nanoha left in her wake were enough to give the Belkan her general area.

 _‘Blind her when she gets close,’_ Nanoha ordered, and swerved right, towards the TSAB mages, deliberately leaving a visible trail. The green-haired girl spotted it, riding her flying surfboard-thing, and veered in with sword drawn.

 _‘Now!’_ snapped Nanoha, and flickered briefly into visibility as Vesta dropped the cloak to focus on offense. Binding the Breaker didn’t work at all; she’d found that out last fight. Hitting her with illusions was a good deal more effective. A mirror-bright haze formed over the girl’s face as Vesta’s illusion took hold, reflecting all the light away. Nanoha took the opportunity to shoot her twice in the stomach as she kicked upwards again, and was pleased to see that one of them got through. The Breaker could fight blind, which she’d sort of expected, but obviously not as well.

The girl on the board flashed Nanoha a grin and changed course as she soared in, targeting the bigger threat now that she was compromised. Sword met hammer with a clash that threw her off the board, but it circled round and down to catch her as she fell. And the split second of recovery cost the Breaker, as the red bullets that had been following in the girl’s shadow slammed home, scorching her dress and drawing a wince.

Nanoha faded back into invisibility again, and drew back from the developing brawl. The board girl – Mei, she vaguely recalled; one of the ones she’d helped on the Garden – was going in for another attack, with her teammate getting as many shots in with his pistols while the illusion lasted. But it was already fraying, and a shining scarlet aura around the Knight was absorbing most of the damage.

And then the air screamed, and a road of light dropped down towards the Knight from on high. Nanoha winced despite herself. She knew what that meant. And she was proven right a second later as Quint hurtled down it, heavily armoured and hunched low against the wind.

The Breaker tore the illusion spell from her in the moment before they met, and the clash of fist against hammer sent both of them tumbling backwards and down. Tiida took advantage of the girl’s uncontrolled fall. His pistols erupted with a flare of red fire several times the width of their barrels, ejecting what looked like spent casings.

“Firing!” he called out.

The redhaired little _monster_ swatted the plume with a blow from her monstrously oversized warhammer, dispersing it. A moment later, Tiida was forced to dodge for his life as a pair of metal bullets came shooting back the other way.

Nanoha bit her lip. She wanted to go and help them. But... no. They were enough to keep the Breaker busy, and helping would probably blow her cover, if she hadn’t already blown it with all the pink magic she’d been throwing around. Anyway, her job wasn’t to get involved in the fight, it was to break the barrier and make an escape route. She turned, taking in the barrier’s size and shape, and took a deep breath. There was probably enough magic in the air for a Starlight Breaker by now. The issue would be building it up before anyone could attack her and disrupt it. Maybe if she...

_‘Mistress!’_

Blue light glimmered, terrifyingly subtle. Nanoha burned a Flash Move without pausing for thought, more thankful than ever for Vesta’s mana-whisker spell. The blue knife burst before it reached the point she’d been hovering, spreading into a net that expanded out to snare anything nearby.

Chrono.

The Enforcer trailed blue sparks behind him as he went, popping and fizzling as they dispersed into the air he flew through. Nanoha knew better than to risk going near them. He was laying traps; carving up the battlefield to counter her invisibility. Worse yet, Mei was peeling away from the fight with the Breaker to help him. A Starlight Breaker wouldn’t be viable, not anymore. She’d need to find another way.

And then her illusion flickered. She _felt_ it stutter for a second, saw the boy’s focus snap to her. It was so startling that for a moment she was speechless.

_‘Vesta!’_

_‘It wasn’t me!’_ Vesta defended herself, sounding just as panicked. _‘Something’s attacking my... ah!’_ Another flicker in the cloak. Nanoha dropped like a stone as a swordblade whistled through the air over her head, snapped a bind around Mei’s legs that jerked her off her board, and twisted around a Stinger blade. _‘Something’s interfering with my spell! I don’t know where it’s coming from! I think it- watch out!’_

Too late. Something _detonated_ to one side – a spell? No, a trap. She’d flown too close to one of the trails. Her cloak failed altogether, dissolving into nothing. A stasis field sprang out from the trap, engulfing her whole left arm and half of Raising Heart, locking them in place. She hissed and twisted, shooting away from the trap before it could cover any more of her. The stasis spell felt like a variant of the one Linith had used on her broken arm, she knew how to break it. She just needed enough time to...

But Chrono was already arcing in, fast and grim, Stinger blades glittering around him. He was, Nanoha realised in horror, using lethal force. Treating her as a deadly opponent, as if she were...

Nanoha suddenly felt like hitting herself. Of _course_ he would treat her as if she were one of the Wolkenritter. For all he knew, she was. The anonymous barrier jacket certainly didn’t say otherwise. But if she told him who she was, she’d be blowing her cover for sure!

 _‘Raising Heart!’_ she called, swinging her Device around awkwardly to meet the Stinger blades homing in on her. It wasn’t pointed in quite the right direction. But it didn’t need to be. The red gem pulsed in understanding.

[Divine Barret]

A hundred pink rays exploded from the tip of the staff, bursting forward into the swarm of shooting spells. The sky lit up with explosions as bolt met beam dozens of times over, and Chrono was forced to throw himself out of the aerial minefield as Nanoha backpedalled furiously. But the green-haired girl was there; back on her board already and coming in from above and behind. Pinned between her and the explosions, with Chrono cutting around the side towards her, Nanoha took the only course open to her and bolted downwards, into the city high rises.

A trap was waiting for her.

Her vision and hearing shut off as it detonated, protecting her from being blinded or deafened. But in the split second of unawareness, she felt cold binds wrap around her, immobilising her. Her vision cleared to the sight of a swordpoint streaking towards her. Terrified and bound, Nanoha did the only thing she could.

She shifted her Barrier Jacket.

The reaction was immediate. Mei was close enough that Nanoha actually saw her eyes widen in shock as she recognised her. She leaned to the side, pulling out of the collision course in a sideways flip that ruffled Nanoha’s hair as it passed. Nanoha took the opportunity to shatter the field over her arm, and felt the web of blue wire that held her slacken as Vesta applied blood-red claws to the thin strands.

Chrono made no move to attack her as she freed herself. He hung in the air, pale with shock. “You!” he accused. Then his eyes narrowed. “Wait, then...”

But Nanoha had no intention of letting him finish his train of thought. Raising Heart came up, glowing with gathered mana.

_‘Vesta, I’m freeing up some of Raising Heart’s processing power for you. Are you ready?’_

_‘Fire at will, mistress!_

[Divine Shooter Phantom Shift]

The sky lit up with spellfire. But not in the expected proportions. _Hundreds_ of pink shots erupted from Raising Heart’s tip; the cloud of real bullets padded out threefold by Vesta’s illusions. Chrono didn’t even try to block, he vanished in a speed move as the cone of missiles rocketed out, punching through windows and walls. Mei kicked her board up, holding it in front of her as a shield and casting a slow-fall spell. The blur that was Chrono resolved itself at the edge of the nearest tower block, flitting behind it for protection.

Nanoha went for altitude. The Shift would keep them occupied for a few seconds, and if she could use them to get some distance, she’d be able to think of a way to get everyone out. She just needed a little time to _think_...

But she didn’t have it. No sooner had she cleared the buildings than a red streak rocketed towards her. Literally. A plume of smoke and fire roared from the back of the Breaker’s hammer, propelling her towards Nanoha like a missile. She whirled and struck as Nanoha threw herself out of the way, and the spiked point of the thing whistled past bare centimetres from her chest. The wind of its passage struck her regardless, sending her into an uncontrolled tumble through a window that ended in the wreckage of an office desk.

She emerged through the rubble of the wall just as Quint caught up.

The TSAB mage wasn’t holding back. She hit the Breaker from behind, clipping her leg with an armoured fist and a horrible crack despite the Knight’s attempt to dodge. Her Wing Road formed a tight loop and she turned around within a bodylength to make another pass. A storm of bullets from Tiida hemmed the Breaker in from behind and a rapid-fire volley of punches from Quint sent shooting spells hurtling to either side, closing up her avenues of escape.

She dodged anyway. Flying backwards, _through_ the hail of bullets Tiida was laying down, the Breaker shifted her hammer into its huge war form. She swung it with terrible speed, the massive weight catching Quint in the ribs as Quint’s fist met her own smoking armour. Quint’s body folded around the blow, and her Wing Road shattered beneath her as it knocked her down towards the streets below. But the Breaker was thrown back too, clutching her stomach in pain, straight into another flare of red fire from Tiida’s pistols.

The Breaker emerged from the plume of mana, singed and smoking but still intact. She shook off her hammer, venting coolant from the mechanisms.

Her hat; a large red thing with bunny heads on either side, was not so resilient. It fluttered down to the street, half-burnt away and still smoking. The Breaker looked up at him with murder in her eyes, and held her hammer out to the side. Down below, Quint caught herself and struggled for altitude, cradling her ribs in a way that didn’t look good.

“Graf Eisen!” shouted the Breaker, her voice shaking with fury. “Load cartridge!”

The mechanism in the shaft fired, and an explosion of power built around her. The hammer spat out two empty shells, and she caught them out of the air in a single practiced movement.

[Raketenform!]

It shifted back into its rocket form, and a casting circle appeared around the Breaker’s feet. Nanoha saw what was about to happen in a burst of horror. Tiida was already fleeing, but not fast enough. One strike from that hammer might kill him. The Breaker was too strong, too powerful, and even Nanoha’s Jacket couldn’t survive a direct hit like that. Bringing Raising Heart up, she aimed high and gathered power.

[Raketenhammer!]

[Divine Buster!]

The Breaker spun once, then twice as the engine roared, and exploded from her casting circle like a missile. She looped towards Tiida’s fleeing figure, each spin focusing the rocket’s output down to an even thinner, fiercer flame. She plummeted down towards him...

... and a beam of pink light came out of nowhere to stop her.

Somehow, she diverted the force of the swing into the bombardment spell at the last second. It exploded around her, pink streams of light bursting out in all directions as the containment of the beam was destroyed. The Breaker snarled, her prey lost, as Quint rolled in for another blow. She was moving along her Wing Road fast enough that it was barely keeping ahead of her; blazing with blue light, a visible aura crackling around her fist.

Once, twice; three times the cartridge system fired. Red light surged, and the Knight of the Iron Hammer charged. There was no finesse now, no manoeuvring, no tricks or covering fire. The two Belkan-users shot towards each other in a straight line; a pure contest of strength and power, and met halfway.

The clash was cataclysmic. Every window in the nearby tower blocks shattered. Nanoha felt the shockwave from almost a block away, and Tiida was thrown into a tumbling spin. Three shapes hurtled out of the smoke cloud. The hammer went high, ripped out of the Breaker’s hands, and hit the side of an office block hard enough to embed it up to the hilt. Quint shot out at a right angle from the direction she’d entered at; her armour gone and her arm bent in a way that couldn’t be anything but broken. She slammed into the first floor of a department store and broke through the wall, bouncing once before lying still.

The Breaker plummeted almost straight down, and a lorry crumpled around her as she slammed into it, cratering the street beneath her. Nanoha was aiming before the dust had even begun to settle. Pink light built and surged, and from somewhere above her she was vaguely aware of another bombardment spell doing the same.

[Divine Buster]

[Blaze Cannon]

Blue flame and pink fury hammered down on the fallen knight.

But they were interrupted before they got there. A coruscating green barrier covered the Breaker, and a field shimmered into place above it with a sensation Nanoha recognised. An AMF. The bombardment spells hit it and _plumed_ , their structure breaking down, becoming fractally-spreading cones of unbound mana. Robbed of its concentration and focus, the wave of magic crashed into the street, fracturing the tarmac and smashing every vehicle nearby.

And then swirled, like water around a plughole. Streaked lines of light spun and were sucked in as the green barrier drew the ambient mana into itself. The crackling on its surface built in intensity, and Nanoha realised what it was a second too late.

A reactive barrier. And a mana condensation spell. Rather like...

The AMF vanished.

And the sky lit up with fire.

...

She landed on a roof, and bounced, feeling it crumble beneath her.

She landed again on another roof and rolled, until the roof ran out.

She landed a third time, with a sense of some finality, on a pavement. The world swum and spun, and she managed to muster enough awareness to groan.

Was that what getting hit by her Divine Busters felt like?

Wow.

She made a mental note to be more sympathetic to people she did that to in future.

“Ms-ss! Aryu... wen-g... ere!”

“... huh?” Nanoha managed, blinking. Sounds were sort of fading in and out randomly. Something pulled her up roughly by the arm, and the world resolved into something resembling normal.

“Are you alright?” It was Vesta, crouched over her with her ears flattened against her head. “We need to get out of here! Now! Can you move?”

“Where’s... what...” Nanoha shook her head, and winced at the jolt of pain it sent through her skull. Her ankle hurt – quite a lot, actually – and she was fairly sure she’d landed on her right arm on the first impact, because everything from the elbow up was a solid mass of pain.

“... yeah,” she conceded, her thoughts clearing. “Yeah, okay, let’s... wait... wait, no.”

Vesta let out a half-mewl, half-hiss of frustration. “What _now?_ ”

Nanoha pointed, wincing. The ruined wall of a department store was on the other side of the street, only a few buildings down from them. “That’s where Miss Quint landed. She might not be on our side, but she’s a good person, and she was helping fight the Breaker. I want to check she’s okay.”

“... aaargh. Fine! But quickly!” Vesta scooped her up, ignoring Nanoha’s protests, and leapt upwards, bringing them to the hole in the wall in a couple of mana-assisted bounds and setting her down again. “We’ll check she’s alive, and then we can leave her for the TSAB to take care of and everything will be...”

She trailed off, and her eyes widened with horror as they came to rest on the inside of the store. Quint lay sprawled on the floor in her under-Jacket, her plated armour shattered by the brutal clash, her violet hair spread out like a curtain across the floor. Her arm was horribly broken – Nanoha could see bone jutting out from under the skin – and her left leg was bent at an angle that definitely wasn’t natural.

And there was a hand sticking through her ribcage.

It was a construct; woven from lines of green light, and it emerged from her chest as though someone had stuck their arm through her heart. It held a shining mote of light in its palm, and it was _squeezing_ , and the shining glow dimmed with every fractional tightening of its fingers. Nanoha moaned in horror, her hand coming to her lips as she staggered away. This... this wasn’t right. This couldn’t happen. Someone like Quint... someone so powerful, so unstoppable... seeing her lying broken and beaten like this on the ground was _wrong_.

[Divine Shooter]

A pink bullet tore through the spectral hand, and it dispersed. Nanoha looked down at Raising Heart in vague surprise. She hadn’t even been aware of lifting it to shoot. The glowing mote; faded but still shining faintly, floated back down into Quint’s chest. Nanoha wasn’t sure, but she thought the woman’s breathing eased a little as it returned.

“I should...” she began, and hesitated. She didn’t really _know_ anything about first aid, but... she did know a couple of basic healing spells. They couldn’t hurt, right? She began to move forwards carefully; wary in case the hand-thing made a comeback.

 _‘Vesta,’_ she said quietly. _‘Into my hood. Use your whisker spell. If you sense_ anything _moving near me that shouldn’t be; stop it.’_ She caught Vesta as the catgirl shifted back into her kitten form and helped her up into her hood, shuddering at the thought of that hand sticking out from _her_ chest. Being drained dry like that; helpless to do anything but watch... that wasn’t going to happen. Not if she had any say in the matter.

“Nanoha!”

She jerked around, looking down at the street through the hole in the wall. It was Fate; battered and singed and holding Bardiche, which looked considerably worse-for-wear. Arf stood next to her, carrying Alicia bridal-style. The little girl was pale and still, and for a heartstopping moment Nanoha thought the worst. But no, her chest was still rising and falling, slowly, and her Jewel Seed implant had a faint glow to it.

“Nanoha, come on, we need to go! Now!”

Nanoha looked helplessly over her shoulder. “But...” She took a deep breath. “Where’s Linith?”

“ _Now!_ The Hound is coming! And it’s not the only thing around here!”

“Linith’ll be waiting for us,” Arf added, “but we need to move!”

“Huh?”

Fate pointed, and Nanoha followed her gaze. The crater and ruined lorry where the Breaker had landed was further down the road, but... were those mages around it? Strange ones; three or four of them, wearing anonymous Barrier Jackets and closing in on the fallen Knight. A sea-green dome was keeping them back, but even as Nanoha watched, one of them lifted its arm and...

... changed. The flesh seemed to _flow_ , shifting and reconfiguring to form a slender gun barrel. A greyish glow built up in it for a second and then exploded out in a burst that made the entire barrier flicker.

That decided her. If the Hound was pursuing them, it would be too busy to do anything potentially lethal to Quint, and she wanted to get as far away from _those things_ as possible. Nanoha jumped down, wincing as she landed on what was starting to feel more and more like a twisted ankle, and limped over to them. “Okay. What do we do?”

“We’re retreating to the fall-back position.” said Arf decisively. “We’ve got Alicia, Linith will be waiting there; we can get out of here. Your mother and friends are safe; the Wolkenritter won’t target them and the TSAB mages were guarding them last I saw. And the Hound is following us, so,” she glanced over her shoulder, “we really, _really_ need to get moving. Come on.”

Nanoha nodded and let Fate take her arm. The familiar blur of speed overtook her as the buildings to either side dissolved in a rush, and they flashed down the streets to the extraction point they’d agreed on. Fate felt weaker and shakier than Nanoha liked, but she’d be fine once she got some food in her and calmed down. All they had to do was...

... stop.

It felt like running into a finely-woven net of taut wire. Nanoha felt her Barrier Jacket flicker as though drained by the contact. She tumbled to the ground as pressure bloomed in thin welts along her face, and Fate’s grip on her slipped. She caught herself before she landed, skidding along the street and turning back in a mixture of worry and annoyance. What had they just run into? How had they missed it?

The “what” was plain enough. But so shocking that it took her a second for her eyes to register it.

A spiderweb of green strands was flickering into visibility, stretched across the street. It was torn and frayed where they had punched through it, but it had done its job in stopping them. Fate was stationary, teetering on her feet, and briefly vulnerable.

A green-woven hand emerged from her chest, holding a bright ball of light.

She stared down at it; eyes wide and terrified, face pale, hands grasping at nothing. Her mouth moved soundlessly as Bardiche clattered to the floor and her hands came up to claw at her chest, but it didn’t help. The shining ball of light dimmed before them both as the hand gripped it, ripping the magic from it until it was barely flickering.

“Fate!” Arf screamed from somewhere behind Nanoha; skidding to a halt as she realised why her mistress had fallen behind. But then she gasped, choking, and Nanoha heard her drop to one knee. She trembled helplessly, lifting Raising Heart to point at the hand as best she could through the shaking. The look Fate gave her was somewhere between desperate and pleading.

“D-div-vine...” Nanoha forced out, her voice shaking. This was... this was horrible. Nightmarish. This wasn’t something she could fight, this wasn’t someone she could demand answers from. Not this... this attack from out of nowhere, targeting the weak and the injured; those with lowered defences who couldn’t stop it.

This was terrifying.

“D-Divine...”

And the hand winked out.

Fate slumped, and Nanoha wasn’t caught quite off-guard enough that she couldn’t catch her as she fell. Pulling her friend’s arm across her shoulders and heaving up, she turned, dreading what she might see but unable to stop herself.

Alicia lay on the ground, just as pale and motionless as she’d been in the tank. A little orange puppy lay tangled between her legs, curled into a ball. Nanoha vaguely heard someone speaking; babbling “no” and “please” and “don’t be dead” until the words ran together. She dragged Fate’s limp weight over to the pair as fast as she could and checked; first one, then the other.

Warmth. Breathing. Two heartbeats. They were both alive, at least. Nanoha let out a shuddering sigh of relief as the icy grip of terror released her heart.

 _‘No you_ don’t! _’_

Nanoha felt a brief tightening of her collar and a weight push off her back. A deep snarl sounded behind her, and then a crunch of jaws she recognised. She spun.

It was the green hand. But it wasn’t draining her. And the reason was obvious.

Vesta had bitten it in half.

From the way the fingers spasmed as it dissolved in the tigress’s jaws, it had hurt. A lot. Nanoha hoped, vindictively, that whatever it was had some sort of sensory link back to whoever had cast the thing. She breathed out slowly as she watched it fade, feeling her trembling slow.

“Thank you,” she said fervently, and the situation was tense enough that Vesta didn’t even preen at the praise. Growling softly, the familiar looked at Fate, Alicia and Arf, measuring them against Nanoha and herself.

 _‘Whoever it was, I don’t think they’ll try again,’_ she said. _‘Harden your Barrier Jacket just in case, then sling Fate and Alicia onto me. I’ll give them this one ride for free. Can you take Arf?’_

Nanoha nodded, already slinging Fate’s limp body across Vesta’s back. She gently lifted Alicia on in front of her sister, then cradled Arf carefully in her arms. “Fall-back point. Which way?”

Vesta gestured, then froze and hissed. _‘Trouble.’_

“Trouble?” Nanoha glanced back down the street behind them, and bit back a curse. “Oh... no. No. Not after all of this. _No_.”

The Hound was advancing on them. Quickly. He looked a little the worse for wear, and more of the dark, anonymous-clad figures were following him, but there was no question as to what would happen if he caught up with them. And in the condition the two of them were in, they had no chance of holding him off. Nanoha looked uncertainly at Vesta. “You go,” she said, a faint quaver in her voice. “Get them out, and I-I’ll...”

_‘No.’_

There was no room for argument in Vesta’s tone. She flexed her paws, and bloody light flared under them. Nanoha lifted Raising Heart in one hand, holding Arf to her protectively with the other. She sighted down her Device at the approaching figure, her arm shaking.

And then green light flared once more. But this wasn’t the cool green of lakes and seas, and it didn’t form to protect the Cloud Knight. It was bright and fierce and layered; a barrier stretching clear across the street.

And it formed to stop him.

Cloak billowing out behind him; Yuuno Scrya touched down between the Hound and his prey. He glanced, just once, over his shoulder. And Nanoha took a shaky breath at everything in his eyes, but he didn’t speak, and he didn’t stare. He turned back towards the Hound and the dark figures gathering on the rooftops around them both, tensing as the first blow met his shields, and spoke.

“Go. I’ll hold them off.”

Nanoha stood perfectly still for five long seconds.

“Yuuno...” she breathed softly.

Then, tears trickling down her cheeks, she turned with Vesta and ran.

...

Yuuno faced the Hound, the barrier glowing between them as Nanoha fled behind him. He would probably get in trouble for this, but that wasn’t important at the moment. She was alive and safe, somehow, and he had a threat in front of him. Or should that be several threats? He snapped out a Chain Bind as one of the masked figures tried to bypass the barrier and go after the girls; locking it in place.

The others seemed to be paying more attention to the Hound. They circled like predators, and the Hound threw him a look of frustration before backing away, getting distance from the wall to better deal with his new opponents. Yuuno held back, willing to watch and wait. He didn’t know who the new figures were, but they seemed to be acting against the Wolkenritter, and that was good enough to let them be for now.

His tolerance took an abrupt downturn as they attacked. Arms morphed into blades as they darted in, harrying the Hound with vicious slashes and grey-tinted bolts. One of them hung back on the rooftops, forming a barrel-arm and taking brutal shots whenever it had an opportunity. They were going for the tome at the Cloud Knight’s hip, Yuuno could tell. But they weren’t fighting like mages. Mages couldn’t shift shape like that. And the list of things that could was both short and sinister.

 _‘Scrya, where are you?’_ Chrono. His voice sounded terse. _‘Zwischenfall said you went after the Hound, and something about new hostiles. And Testarossa. Tell me she was seeing things on that point.’_

 _‘It was Testorossa,’_ Yuuno confirmed, and felt a silent curse from Chrono. _‘Nanoha was with her; they’ve retreated. I have four... no, five hostiles mobbing the Hound. They’re not human; constructs of some sort. They attacked the Hound when it tried to drain Heidi and Rizu. As soon as he brought the Book out.’_

_‘They’re here too. The Breaker’s down, but the Blade is defending it, and there’s a shield up that’s probably the Healer’s work. We’ve got six or seven of them, and they’re going after us as well. Can you fall back? Nakajima went down; we need someone to support her, and Grangaitz is injured.’_

Yuuno snapped out a bind as another of the constructs tried to get past his barrier. They were starting to turn to him now, and he collapsed the street-wide barrier in favour of a smaller, personal-scale one. Nanoha was probably away by now. His job here was done.

 _‘I can try,’_ he offered. _‘Wait, I think...’_

One of the constructs had managed to get onto the Hound’s back, and was stabbing him in the shoulder. He dropped to his knees as the rest closed in around him and the leader on the rooftops took aim.

And then he roared. Something fired in his gauntlets – a cartridge mechanism without a Device – and he exploded onto his feet. A white spike erupted from the ground in front of him, passing over his shoulder to skewer his assailant through the head and tear it from him. Yuuno gaped despite himself at the sheer brutality of it. He’d known the Wolkenritter killed, but to see it like this...

The corpse melted. No. It _liquefied_ into a pool of oil-like sludge that burst into chemical flame hot enough to scorch the pavement slabs.

Even as his eyes widened in horror, a new mage appeared in the midst of the killing circle. There was no warning, no build-up of magic that normally accompanied an inbound teleport signal. The figure just blinked into being; an indistinct silhouette surrounded by rippling air. The blinding silver-grey shot from the rooftops broke against a whirling shield, and the new mage returned fire with a thin blade that cut clean through the cannon’s barrel.

“The Wraith?” Yuuno breathed.

The constructs lunged, but a volley of spikes from the ground drove them back, skewering another and forcing another into the still-burning chemical fire. It caught light like a torch, flailing briefly before dissolving into more of the bright-burning sludge, splattering the pavement and giving off thick, noxious fumes. The new arrival seemed entirely unconcerned. It nodded courteously, made three precise gestures, and a Midchildan casting circle spun out from under it.

And then they were gone; Hound and helper both. Yuuno stared for a second before snapping into action.

_‘Chrono! The constructs self-destruct if you destroy them; stay clear! And another mage just showed up and teleported the Hound out – no signal, no trace, nothing! It could be the Wraith, and it’ll probably go for the others next...’_

_‘I see it. Thanks.’_

Yuuno left Chrono to it, and looked warily at the two remaining constructs. Grey magic, fluid-form, flammable chemical sludge when destroyed...

“Mariage,” he murmured quietly. They tensed, and he raised his hands in readiness. He could probably beat two of them, even if one was a leader-type. But there was little point when he couldn’t capture them, not with a self-destruct mechanism of that calibre.

Mariage. After the Book of Darkness. Such a concentrated source of mana – and a way of collecting more. Of course they would want it. His lips thinned as he tried to tell which of them would attack him first, and how.

It was a moot point. They regarded him for a second longer, assessing their chances. Then they turned and bolted.

Yuuno closed his eyes and sighed, feeling very weary all of a sudden. But his exhaustion only lasted a moment. Then, taking a deep breath and reopening his eyes, he rose into the air and sped off in search of Quint.

...

“Linith!” Nanoha gasped, bursting into the sidestreet they’d designated their fallback point. “Linith, we- Linith!” The last word was a shriek as she bolted forward, one arm still cradling Arf, the other stretched out. The older cat-familiar was slumped down in a recess, gasping. “What happened? Are you okay? Did the... the hand-thing get you? Why didn’t you say something?”

“It’s... fine, dear,” Linith managed. “Just... a little exhaustion. I d... didn’t want to be a fuss. Where’s Alicia?” Her breathing was laboured, but with Nanoha’s help she managed to move over and examine the young girl. With a shaking hand laid on the implant, she mouthed something, formed a casting circle and _twisted_.

Alicia jerked slightly, and the light of the Jewel Seed brightened.

“There,” Linith breathed, sounding even more spent. Her form rippled and shrunk into a curled-up cat. _‘Now, Nanoha dear. If... you would be so kind as to get us out of here... I don’t believe I have the power for it right now. And yes, Fate,’_ she added, glancing at the girl, who was mumbling something and trying to push herself up with arms like wet noodles, _‘I will teach you how to do that. Later. If I can.’_

Any direction was better than none, and Nanoha was past caring about leaving traces. Mustering up what reserves she had left, she spent a casting circle spinning out from her feet and pulled all six of them into the teleport.

They arrived to alarm bells. Someone must have set up a shunt, because instead of the teleport room they appeared on the bridge. At least three different klaxons were shrieking, and Hektor’s rasping voice was raised in a shout. His normal gravelly drawl was gone; he sounded rough and fierce and furious.

“They’re back! Bring up the shields! We’ll head for the turbulence spinwards an’ lose any pursuit in the caustics! Wilhelm, get yer damned hide to the engine room and bring the reactor up to full power! Bene, I ain’t payin’ ya to dawdle, get the EMCM goin’! Ićeoak, get Testarossa outta here an’ deal with this lot!”

Nanoha gasped as she suddenly realised what the armoured woman was leaning over and tending to. Precia was on the floor in the recovery position, deathly pale. There was a gash on her head, oozing blood, but that was nothing compared to the red on her hands and around her mouth. Nanoha’s almost staggered. First Quint and now Precia; seeing such mighty bastions of power laid low was like having the pillars of her world smashed out from under her.

“Mo... mother!” Fate coughed out, lurching forward and collapsing onto the deck. “Mo... ther...” Struggling for breath, she tried to push herself up, but her arms gave out before she was halfway to her hands and knees. She gave a moan of fear as she slumped back to the floor, helpless. “Is... she...”

“She collapsed,” Ićeoak said quietly, the glow of healing magic illuminating the faceplate. “Maybe five minutes ago. She’s not waking up. How’s her familiar?”

“U-unconscious, I think,” Nanoha managed to stutter. “Will she wake up? Please, save her! She can’t... we can’t do without her! We _need_ her!”

Ićeoak frowned. “I’ll do what I can, but...” She grimaced and lifted Precia carefully with the help of a field, gently supporting the woman as she carried her out of the bridge and towards her room.

“The point’s moot,” growled Hektor over his shoulder. “Miss Takamachi, as yer the only one still fully conscious, I’m tenderin’ our resignation to you. We’re pulling out of this job. You’ve got the TSAB breathing down our necks – they’ll track that teleport eventually – on top o’ the Book of bloody Darkness an’ whatever other monstrosities were caught up in that. Get to yer rooms an’ don’t cause any trouble; we’ll take you back to Schzenais and drop you off there.”

“What?” Nanoha’s head flew up, betrayal clear in her eyes. “We can’t just _leave_ , what about Earth? What about...”

“Firstly, the TSAB can handle the Book,” Hektor snapped, turning for the first time to face her fully, his dark eyes glittering angrily. “They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again. Secondly, my priority is lookin’ after me own, an’ in this case that involves not being near a genocidal death machine that eats mages like us for breakfast. Thirdly, did it enter yer mind to wonder what’d happen to Testarossa if you stayed, Miss Takamachi? She looks like she needs a hospital to my eye, and I don’t see one on-board this ship, do you? And fourthly, I am the captain of this ship, and so it’s my decision as to what we do in extraordinary circumstances! An’ as I’d say these circumstances count as pretty damned extraordinary, you are in no position to tell me what I can and cannot do!”

Vesta snarled at the man, but Nanoha shrunk back under the outburst. Stubbornness still gleamed in her eyes for a moment, until it was squashed by a weak hand slipping into hers.

“He’s right, Nanoha,” Fate breathed quietly. “We need...” She coughed, taking ragged breaths between words, “... need to get Mother to a hospital, or... or a doctor, or _someone_.”

“I...” Nanoha started uncertainly, and stopped. “I... okay.” She hung her head. “I’ll... y-you go, get Precia somewhere she’ll b-be safe, and I’ll...” She took a shaky breath. “I’ll t-turn myself in. I need to stay and help f-fight the Book, and this way... this way I can do some good.” Her face twitched in an attempt at a smile. “Maybe I can make up for the people I hurt on the Garden.”

 _‘Mistress!’_ Vesta objected, rounding on her. _‘You can’t do that, they’d put a Limiter on you or something! You can’t risk that!’_

Nanoha shook her head. “No. They... Miss Quint said they’d only take my magic away in a worst-case thing. We didn’t kill anyone, and... and I did hurt people, but not hundreds and hundreds. If I give myself up and promise to help fight the Book, I... think they would probably let me. And that would – might – get them to go easier on me afterwards?” The last was a question, directed at Hektor’s back as he stood stiffly at the wheel.

“Maybe,” he grunted, after a pause for thought. “I ain’t happy about the idea, even if you swear to keep yer mouth shut on our part in gettin’ you here.”

“I’ll keep quiet about you, I promise.”

He sniffed. “And I’m sure I’ll take your word on that. Regardin’ yer chances... yer young, the Bureau’s inclined to be lenient, an’ they need every mage they can get for this case. I wouldn’t bet on ducking a Limiter altogether, but there’s a good chance you’d be shot of it ‘fore you reach adulthood.” He glanced back over his shoulder at her. “Assumin’, that is, that you survive the Book to get there.”

Linith coughed – her first sign of movement since they had arrived, and Nanoha scrambled over to her. “Linith! How are you feeling? Are you okay? Precia collapsed, I think she’s sick or something... um... uh, Hektor says he’s pulling out of the job, and I’m... I’m going to go and help the TSAB fight the Book, but he’ll take Precia to a hospital! And... um...”

 _‘Hush, Nanoha.’_ Linith’s mental voice was weak and faint, but still held enough sternness to send Nanoha’s jaw clicking shut. _‘I don’t have a lot of time, and... I don’t know if or when I’ll wake up after this. Precia is... she doesn’t have long left. I can tell. She may wake up with time, she may not. I will be going into hibernation shortly, to avoid straining her. But there are things I need to tell you first. So, listen.’_

She took a shallow breath, and her tail twitched. _‘In my time serving Precia, I have... learned a few things. You... will need to know them too, if you are going to deal with people like Hektor. Be scrupulously honest and fair when dealing with criminal parties. Never double-cross them, unless... unless they have already betrayed you. Expect betrayal, but do not act first. And remember... although you are a more powerful mage than most; they have numbers. And they_ will _cheat, if they are betraying you, and avoid fighting fair. Use... things like food- and air-scanners. Wear a military-grade Barrier Jacket if you do not feel safe; never drop below a covert Barrier Jacket at any time.’_

She paused again, this time for longer. _‘There are... parties you can trust not to turn you in to the Bureau. Ones equally at risk from them, who would be arrested on sight. Do not trust them, even if they will not betray you to the TSAB. They always have their own... goals...’_ She broke off to pant harshly, her ears flat against her skull. _‘There is so much more... ah, but we’re running out of time. Ask Raising Heart and Bardiche. I... took the liberty of putting some hidden files on them. They’ll allow you access now. Some of the advice you need. And now... now I’m going to tell you to ignore that last part of it. There... there is a man you will need to take Precia too. Files on her condition... on... on Raising Heart. Show them to him. Fate and Alicia will need you to safeguard them there, but... he can help her. I... I hope Precia doesn’t hate... hate me for ig... igno...’_

“Who?” Nanoha whispered, leaning close, tears dripping from her cheeks to wet Linith’s fur. The last few words breezed into her mind, barely audible above the clamour of the alarms. Then the cat’s eyes flickered shut and her breathing slowed to almost nothing, as she slipped into a deep, deep slumber.

Nanoha stayed there for a moment, her mind awhirl. Vesta butted her head lightly against her shoulder, and Nanoha slung an arm around the tigress reflexively, cuddling into her.

 _‘Well, mistress? If you go to the TSAB, I’ll come with you. Or we could go where Linith says.’_ Vesta purred, deep, rumbling and reassuring. _‘I’m with you either way, you know that.’_

Nanoha nodded absently, and gave a squeeze of thanks.

Then she straightened, and fixed Hektor with a determined glare.

“We’re not going back to Schzenais,” she said bluntly. “You can drop us off at a safehouse; we have a contact nearby who we’ll go to. He’ll be able to help Precia, Linith said so. Fate? He has all the stuff to help her, and a hospital would alert the Bureau. And Linith said we should go.”

Fate nodded firmly. “That... yes,” she mumbled. “Do... Linith says. Go there.”

Nanoha smiled encouragingly at her. “It’ll be okay,” she promised. “Everything will be fine, I promise.” She swung back to Hektor, and stubborn blue eyes met dark ones narrowed in suspicion. “I’ll contact him now and tell you where to let us off,” she said; lifting her chin and trying to project authority despite her exhaustion.

He held her gaze for a long minute as wheels turned behind the wrinkled, pockmarked face. And then, to her relief, shrugged.

“Well, that all depends on how close this man is,” he drawled, the fury from earlier faded. “If he’s not too far off our course, I’ll be takin’ your idea into consideration. I ain’t running off to the ‘Rezian Abyss for you, if you know what I’m saying. An’ I hope you’re real certain of your contact’s trustworthiness. You ain’t in much of a state to be fending off someone with ill intent as you are.” He grinned humourlessly, and turned back to the wheel. Nanoha shot a glare at his back, and turned to Vesta.

“Can you get them back to the room?” she asked, nodding at Fate, Alicia, Arf and Linith. “I need to make this call. Now.”

Vesta nodded and shifted back into human form, with Alicia draped across her back. “I’ll handle it. You go do talky stuff.”

Nanoha flashed her a quick smile and trotted away from the bridge, looking for somewhere reasonably private. Finding the galley unoccupied, she settled herself in a chair, brought out Raising Heart, and opened an encrypted line to the number Linith had given her. The line was silent, and the screen was black, but the readouts confirmed the channel was open.

“H-hello?” she said. “Uh, my name’s Nanoha Takamachi, I’m, um... an ally of Precia Testarossa, I guess. She’s hurt – in a coma, and we need help. Her familiar told me to contact you. Um... can you help her? Linith gave me these files to send to you to explain.”

A pause. The black screen stayed so for a few moments, and Nanoha began to wonder if she’d entered the number wrong. She began to count.

“One, two, three, four, five...”

She lost track somewhere in the four hundreds, and resorted to sitting and fretting, counting the minutes. She tried not to think of how each second was counting away Precia’s life, making it more and more likely that Hektor would refuse to take them there. She started reading the other documents on Raising Heart, but they weren’t sinking in.

And then it flickered into life. A man’s face, framed by purple hair and smiling oddly. Down in the bottom left of the image, the display showed the information from the message.

[Ping: 2523.4s]  
[Distance: 1.26 kilolisecs]

Numbers whirred through her head. That was close. Not close-close, but maybe a day’s travel, if the captain was being cautious. Hektor couldn’t object!

The man with the yellow eyes – which once she would have found unusual, but six months in Dimensional Space had cured her of the tendency to stare at eye-colours – inclined his head. “Miss Takamachi, did you say?” he asked. Nanoha blinked and nodded, even if he wasn’t going to see her movement for twenty minutes or more.

“My name is Jail Scaglietti, my dear. And Precia is an old friend of mine.” He grinned charmingly, and his yellow eyes glittered with merriment.

“I’d be delighted to help.”

...


	8. Chapter Seven

The coordinates Scaglietti sent them for the pickup point translated to a lightly wooded hill on a Type-1 world, somewhere in the equivalent of Germany. The air smelt clean and fresh, but the clouds on the horizon marked oncoming rain. Nanoha sat on a rock in the shade of an old larch tree and watched the shuttle recede off into the distance; tickling under Vesta’s chin and thinking about Hektor’s parting remark to them.

“Here we are then,” he’d drawled. Concern would have been too strong a word for the glint in his eyes, but there had perhaps been a touch of fellow-feeling there. “We’ll be headin’ out from here, so you’re on yer own from now on, lass. I’d suggest you make sure you’ve a way outta here in case yer contact turns out not to be so friendly, hmm?”

Now that the mindless panic of Precia’s collapse had dimmed to a sick worry, that comment was niggling at her. _Could_ she trust this man? Linith had told her to go to him, but Linith had also told her that doing so was breaking half the rules she’d made Nanoha promise to keep to when dealing with... with people who were sort of maybe kind of criminals, which was something else that didn’t sit very well with her, to be honest.

She snuck a glance over to the hovering stretcher, enclosed in a sterile bubble of oxygen concentration and pacemaker fields, on which Precia lay. Fate stood next to it, staring down at her mother and Linith with mute focus. She wasn’t showing any signs of pain from her draining, but knowing Fate, she wouldn’t say anything about it if she was feeling any. If she could say anything at all. She hadn’t been speaking much since the fight, and her voice had been a hoarse whisper when she had, in clipped comments in between shifts of watching Precia for any signs of change. The woman was stable, thanks mostly to Ićeoak, but neither she nor Linith had woken yet, and Nanoha could see the strain their absence was putting on her friend. It was certainly putting one on Nanoha herself.

Precia and Linith weren’t the only things for them to worry about, either. Alicia loitered nearby, her usual cheerfulness absent for once, scratching Arf’s head quietly. She’d been awfully quiet in general since being told that Precia had passed out from using too much magic, and Nanoha wasn’t sure how much of the situation’s seriousness she really understood. She was willing to bet, though, that at least some of the girl’s reticence was from the events of... well, the events of the fight. And the... thing, which she had summoned from her doll.

They hadn’t seen it in person. But they’d caught glimpses from range and scanning spells sent forward. Nanoha wasn’t sure exactly what the thing had _been_ , but she was pretty sure she should be worried about it. Quite apart from anything else, it bore a disturbing resemblance to the big paper worm thing that had almost eaten Arisa and Suzuka, back during her first clash with the TSAB. Until she’d shot it and it had turned into a giant dragon and tried to get out of the barrier and probably eat everyone in the city.

... considering this for a moment, Nanoha decided that she should probably be _very_ worried. But asking her had yielded nothing, and Nanoha didn’t really want to push the girl for answers while she was still scared and off-balance. She didn’t think she had the worry to spare for that, on top of everything else.

She hoped her mother was okay. Arisa and Suzuka as well. Fate said that the TSAB had been guarding them when she’d left, and Nanoha trusted the Bureau to do everything they could to keep civilians safe. She wouldn’t be completely happy until she could see for herself that they were fine, though.

With a morose sigh, Nanoha gave up. There were entirely too many things to worry about, here. And their contact was taking forever to show up. Where _were_ they, anyway? She checked the time on Raising Heart. From what Mr Scaglietti had said, they should already...

And then she was there.

The speed of her arrival was incredible. One second the hillside was bare, the next it was occupied. There was no heavy charge of magic, no impact like the huge TSAB man with the spear. She was just there all of a sudden. Nanoha was almost tempted to think she’d teleported in, were it not for the rush of air and the glowing wing-blade things at her wrists and feet.

The new arrival was tall for her age – taller than Nanoha and Fate, easily. She looked like she was a couple of years older than them; just starting to get into the gangly stage where half her body seemed to be arms and legs and knees and elbows. The skintight flight suit she wore – a bit like a thicker, full-body version of Fate’s leotard – only made her proportions stand out more. Despite that, she moved with the same practiced grace as Fate did; a sense of purpose to how she fit into the space around her that spoke of a great deal of training. Her hair was a vivid shock of close-cropped purple, and her eyes were the same odd yellow as Dr Scaglietti’s.

She came to a stop about three metres away from Nanoha, who screamed and fell over.

Vesta took up a defensive stance over her mistress immediately; full-sized and growling. Nanoha couldn’t see Fate, Arf and Alicia from her position under the warcat’s belly, but a yelp, a crackle and a loud snarl marked them reacting much as she had.

“Please stop pointing those at my face,” the other girl said. Nanoha blinked, and realised that she had Raising Heart transformed and somewhat awkwardly raised, poking out under Vesta’s chin. She sheepishly lowered it and crawled out, placing a restraining hand on Vesta’s shoulder to stop her lunging.

“Um... sorry. You startled us.” She glanced back at Fate, who hadn’t followed suit by lowering Bardiche. “We’re... a little on edge. Are you from Dr Scaglietti?”

“Yeah,” the girl said. “I’m Tre. I’m here to take you to the Doctor. Can you teleport?”

“Um...” Nanoha glanced back at Precia’s stasis-locked body. Fate still hadn’t lowered Bardiche. “If we go slowly, then... yeah, we should be. Is it far?”

“Not very,” said Tre. “But we’re going to be making a lot of short jumps so we don’t get followed. Stay close.”

...

It ended up taking almost half an hour to get to the base. They followed a route that involved no less than fourteen short, stealthed dimensional hops along with a great deal of flying to different locations on each world to throw off any tracking. Putting the route together in her head with a little help from Raising Heart as they flew high over a forest of metallic, blue-violet plants somewhere near the equator of the bright, boiling hot Type-5 world that was their penultimate stop, Nanoha realised that they could probably have made the trip in two or three jumps if they’d gone there directly.

Security was one thing, she thought grumpily, but there was such a thing as going overboard. She was worried about Fate. The girl seemed on the edge of fainting after each jump, and Nanoha had effectively been carrying her for the last few hops. She felt exhausted herself. Still, she was glad to hear that their next stop would be their destination. She wasn’t keen on staying on any planet where you needed an air supply and a full environmental Jacket just to go outside.

The last jump was a long one, covering distance, dimensional transit and altitude. They materialised at sea level, just off a green and verdant coast that was a stark contrast to the eye-watering ozone-saturated vistas of the world they’d come from. Nanoha made a valiant attempt to mentally map the coordinates, but the repeated jumps and the stress of the last few days were starting to give her a headache and the numbers slipped away from her. With a tiny sigh, she asked Raising Heart to plot their coordinates to a map of Earth and tell her where they were.

The northeastern edge of Madagascar, apparently. Huh. They came in low, skimming a few dozen metres above the wave crests which... uh... shouldn’t really be there, if Raising Heart was plotting the coordinates right. They should have been several kilometres inland. But apparently not all worlds were the same. Here, they were hovering over a bright cerulean-blue bay, a few hundred metres out from the white line of the beach. The pale sand of the shoreline bled into a mass of trees and jungle, broken here and there by vine-strangled stone-and-steel spires which rose through the canopy like the desperate fingers of a drowning man.

They weren’t the only sign of civilisation. Further down the coast – with a little optical enhancement – Nanoha could see more signs of once-great cities. These weren’t buried in jungle, though, but rather drowned and flooded. Huge megastructures stood like lone, rusted cliffs in the shallow waters of the bay, some eighty or ninety kilometres away and several kilometres out from the rolling beaches. Unlike the overgrown buildings in the jungle, these skyscrapers-turned-sea-platforms appeared to be a hive of activity. With the telescopic aid of her Jacket, she could pick out fleets of tiny boats in the bay waters around the giants – their size illustrating the sheer scale of the colossi. Dots of colour all over the enormous metal frames marked signs of humans replacing or repairing parts for inhabitation, and she could even just about see a buzz of activity and movement in some of the more open sections that must be bustling crowds of people.

Someone prodded her arm sharply, and she snapped back to reality. “Huh?”

“Stay close,” Tre repeated, a slight frown flickering over her face. “You can look around later. You’re here to see the Doctor.”

Oh, right, yes. Caught up in examining her surroundings, she hadn’t noticed falling behind the others. Nanoha flushed bright red at the implicit rebuke, and hurried to catch up.

They alighted on the beach, where Tre raised a hand to stop them before going any further. “There are the remains of damaged nuclear reactors in the ruins here,” she said. “You need to adjust your Jackets to anti-rad mode before we go further in.”

Nanoha swallowed. R-radiation? She hurried to obey.

They walked the rest of the way; Precia’s stretcher floating between Nanoha and Fate, Alicia walking between Vesta and Arf in their war forms. The little girl’s head was on a constant swivel as they made their way into the decaying, overgrown tropical city, trying to take in everything.

The buildings were a strange mix of old and new aesthetics; with roots and vines worming their way under flaking stone facades to reveal metal skeletons and concrete foundations beneath them. A thick carpet of moss covered every rock and brick, and lemurs hooted and screeched at them from empty windows in the tower blocks that still soared above the canopy; their floors filled with invasive plant-life that flourished high above the ground.

Finally, Tre pushed aside a huge fern to reveal what must once have been a plaza; its paved stone floor still mostly intact apart from the weeds and saplings pushing up between the slabs here and there. A sagging blocky building stood on the other side of it; eroded by time and with vines winding their way around the pillars that framed the open doorway. A large tree sat on top of it; its roots sprawling down the walls like a waterfall of wood to punch holes in a set of steps that led up to the roof.

In front of it stood four people.

One of them was the man Linith had told Nanoha to contact. Jail Scaglietti – Doctor Scaglietti, she supposed. He looked much as he had over the comm link; clad in a white lab coat and suit, with purple hair framing his face and excited yellow eyes. He looked fairly young for someone who knew Precia – though Nanoha supposed that Precia looked pretty young who was old enough to be her grandmother, so that didn’t necessarily mean much. He smiled at her in welcome as she automatically took in his companions.

One of them was a girl in her mid-teens who looked a lot like the Doctor. Actually, so did Tre, Nanoha realised. There were differences – Tre was almost as tall as this girl despite being younger, and her hair was bluer than Scaglietti’s where this girl’s was paler, but there was an undeniable resemblance between the three. Maybe they were related. They all had the same eyes, too. She was wearing a crisp uniform of some kind rather than the flight suit Tre wore, and held a tablet Device with faint impatience.

The other two were children. One was a white-haired girl in shorts, a shirt and a small coat, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the Doctor’s feet. She was about Alicia’s age, and was busily engaged in digging up a line of weeds between two of the plaza’s paving slabs with a knife. The last was hard to see at all, partly because she was hiding behind the Doctor, but Nanoha could pick out reddish-brown hair in twin braids, a swish of a sundress and a glimpse of worried yellow eyes peeking back out at her through a glimmer of yellow-green light.

“Miss Takamachi, Miss Testarossa,” greeted Doctor Scaglietti, looking at her and Fate. He had a slight accent that Tre lacked, which Nanoha couldn’t quite place. “Not to mention Miss Testorossa the elder,” he added, dipping a sweeping bow in Alicia’s direction, making her giggle. “I’m glad you arrived safely. I’m Doctor Jail Scaglietti. Tre you have met, this is Uno, Cinque and... Quattro.” He gestured to the clipboard girl, the knife girl and the last girl hiding behind him in turn as he made introductions, though he had to awkwardly crane around for the last one as Quattro refused to let go of the back of his lab coat. The other two looked up as their names were mentioned; Cinque giving a little wave and a smile. “Dieci is gathering the others; they’ll meet us inside. Shall we? Ah, you have a question?”

This last was directed at Nanoha, who had opened her mouth to ask why the girls had numbers instead of names, but Raising Heart was already whispering in her ear.

[Two languages were used, my master. Numbers were spoken in Venotrian; linguistically descended from Low Galean. Accent indicates Venotrian heritage.]

“Miss Takamachi?”

“Huh? Oh, uh,” Nanoha stuttered. It was still odd, but she supposed that having your name mean something in another language wasn’t that strange compared to some of the things she’d seen. Sequential numbers were a bit of a strange choice, but maybe he just thought the words sounded nice. Or possibly he was the same kind of namer of things as Precia. And Fate. And Alicia.

Come to think of it, she was starting to suspect that might be something cultural. Had Yuuno tried to name anything while she knew him? No, wait, now wasn’t the time to think about that. Doctor Scaglietti was still waiting for an answer. “No,” she blurted, “I was just... no, no questions.” She lowered her voice to add “Raising Heart; don’t translate their names, leave them as they are.”

Scaglietti gave her a measured look, then nodded. “Alright. In that case, let’s get dear Precia inside where I can have a look at her.” He waved them over and looked down gravely at Precia’s pale face in the stasis field of the hovering stretcher. “Mmm. I’m sorry to see her like this. Well, I promise you that I’ll work to the limits of my ability to help her. This way, please. Mind your step.”

To Nanoha’s surprise, he turned and led them straight into the doorless opening of the ruined building behind him. She opened her mouth to object as she followed, or at least question why his base was in such a... well, dump. But it only took until she got inside for Raising Heart to adjust to the dimmer light levels and show her. The stone gave way to fresh concrete and new metal struts as they went down several sets of stairs. Electric lights in the ceiling lit the downward-sloping corridor, attired in a fresh coat of white paint. The air was cooler and much less humid.

Alicia trotted forwards to keep pace with him, flanked by her Familiar guards. Her focus wasn’t on Scaglietti, though, but the little girl who was half-jogging to keep up with him. She was difficult to make out even without the Doctor to hide behind; slipping in and out of sight in flickers of yellow-green light. She couldn’t quite manage full invisibility though, perhaps because she was concentrating more on not falling behind; her hand stubbornly gripping to his lab coat, taking two steps for every one of his as he led them down what began as a straight downward-sloping tunnel before branching off into a warren of underground corridors, all looking a lot more modern and well-maintained than the deteriorating city above them.

“Hey,” said Alicia, looking down at her. She was taller than Quattro, who looked like she was only four or so, and didn’t have to jog quite as hard to keep pace with Scaglietti and the hovering stretcher. She squinted at the girl and cocked her head curiously. “Why do you look all weird?”

Quattro shot her a nervous look, stuck her thumb in her mouth with her free hand, and made her way around to Jail’s other side as he turned a corner. Not best pleased at being ignored, Alicia stopped for long enough to scramble up onto a patient Arf’s back, then had her lope forward to catch up again.

“Hey!” she demanded. “I asked you a question! Why are you all... ghosty? Oh! Are you a ghost?” She leaned over precariously to try and prod the younger girl, who squeaked and fled back around to Jail’s right hand side again.

Alicia frowned and looked up at Jail. “I think your little girl is broken,” she confided to him in a loud whisper. “She looks all funny and isn’t saying anything.”

Jail chuckled and reached down to ruffle Quattro’s hair as they paused to let a thick steel door slide open to let them pass. “She’s just a little shy, that’s all. More comfortable with her sisters than with strangers. I’m sure you’ll become good friends in time.”

 _‘How many sisters does she have?’_ asked Arf, tilting her head to look up at him. _‘And where are the others?’_

“Ah, you’d be... Arf? And Vesta. My apologies for not greeting the two of you earlier. I have nine girls in total – Uno, Tre, Quattro and Cinque you’ve met. Due is away on business. Sein was meant to meet you with us, but must have forgotten. She’ll be... around, somewhere.” He waved vaguely with a sigh. “Probably trying to adopt another lemur. And Dieci was just going to fetch Zero and Nulla from the- ah, here they are now.”

And indeed, three more girls were approaching across the large room they’d entered. Nanoha looked over them, and noted that they all had the same yellow eye colour as Jail and the other girls. The one in the lead was the odd one out; brown-haired, wearing a much smaller version of Tre’s flight suit and toting a Bureau-issue shooting staff that was taller than she was. The butt trailed along the floor behind her with a faint scraping noise as she made a beeline for the group.

The other two were obviously sisters, with matching blue hair and an obvious similarity in their faces. Nanoha frowned. Something about them seemed familiar, though she couldn’t quite place it. The older of the two was a couple of years younger than Nanoha herself, and had a dress on. Her little sister, who she was dragging along by one hand, was wearing shorts and a t-shirt that was two sizes too big and which had obviously seen better days. Fairly recent ones, given that wisps of smoke were still curling up from a charred patch near her hip. Uno gave a wordless groan of frustration as soon as she saw the pair, which was explained a moment later as the elder spoke up.

“Uno! Zero stole one of my shirts again and ruined it ‘cause she was playing where she wasn’t meant to!”

“Was not!” the younger defended herself hotly. There was a brief pause as several sets of eyes turned to the smoking hole in her overlarge t-shirt, and she hastily amended herself. “Okay, I was, but Nulla dared me to do it!”

“Did not!”

“Did so!”

“I told you not to play there!”

“You were daring me to do it!”

“Uno, could you deal with this?” Jail asked, glancing at the teenager. “I need to get Precia to the medical labs and have a look at her. Tre?” He gestured at Alicia, along with Quattro and Cinque. “Please take the children to the play area. Miss Takamachi, Miss Testarossa, I assume you’ll want to stay with her?”

Nanoha and Fate nodded fervently.

“Very well then.” He nodded to Uno as she grabbed the blue-haired sisters by the collar and dragged them away for a telling-off, and guided the stretcher away as Tre began to round up the younger children.

 _‘Fate?’_ Arf asked quietly, including Nanoha and Vesta in the whisper. _‘Should we...’_

Nanoha and Fate traded glances. _‘Stay with Alicia,’_ Fate said firmly, despite the weariness in her telepathic voice. _‘Linith said not to trust these people.’_

Nanoha gave a tiny nod of agreement, mindful of watching eyes. _‘We can look after ourselves,’_ she added. _‘Alicia can’t. Stay with her and keep her safe.’_

Arf nodded back, and peeled off with Vesta to flank the little girl as Nanoha and Fate hurried after Precia and their last ditch hope for her recovery.

...

Pink hair. Cold blue eyes. The sword – sheathed at the hip, ignored, unneeded. She couldn’t move, couldn’t walk, couldn’t stop the terrible speed and force, the implacable advance towards the children... the children! Behind her! Alicia was...

Momoko shot awake with a cry, twisting around to stop the swordswoman before she hurt the girls. But her fingers met nothing but soft resistance – a mattress, and the movement snarled her further in what she realised were bedsheets.

A bed?

She extracted herself gingerly, wincing as the bruises on her arms and torso protested. She hadn’t seen exactly how the woman had taken her down, but from the way she had a pounding headache and her chest felt like one solid bruise, it had probably involved a blow to the ribs and a crack to the head. Or perhaps that had been when she’d fallen. Either way, it hurt. A lot.

So. She was in a bed. That was... nice, she supposed. It probably meant they had won, or at least not lost, because she couldn’t really see the swordswoman and her companions carrying her to a bed and tucking her in. But where _was_ she?

Well she wasn’t at home; that was for sure. Now that she thought about it, she remembered one of the TSAB mages doing... something. Whatever it was, it had lessened the pain. But then she’d done something else, and sleep had overtaken her again, and now she was here. Wherever ‘here’ was.

It looked like... actually, the room she was in looked suspiciously similar to the hospital room she’d spent a fortnight in after the swordswoman’s _first_ attack. Momoko groaned. More time spent cooped up and unable to practice magic without being caught by the nurses. Lovely. But no, if the Bureau mage had been taking care of her... was she with them, then? Had she been taken by... by trans-dimensional aliens, onto a UFO or something? Were there going to be probes?

Her eyes were caught by another occupied bed as they wandered over the room. So, she wasn’t alone! At least she had someone to talk to, and maybe get a better idea of where she was. She levered herself upright to see what her roommate looked like.

And froze.

“N-Nakajima-san!” she exclaimed, startled. It was the woman who’d come to tell them that Nanoha was... that they’d lost track of Nanoha, after the business six months ago. She looked in bad... no, in _terrible_ shape. Her face was bruised, battered and pale, one arm was splinted by a glowing field and there was another glow from underneath her sheets that was centred on her chest. What had _happened_ to her?

Momoko turned away, feeling suddenly ill. The... Wolkenritter, that was what the Bureau mage had called them. If this was the kind of damage they could do to a powerful mage with years of training, it was a miracle that she’d escaped from two fights with the swordswoman with her life. That, or... or she’d been holding back. Deliberately. But why?

“You’re awake, good.” It was the girl who’d come to warn them about the Wolkenritter. Momoko was fairly sure her name had been Hilda, or something like that. No, Heidi. She was standing at the door, her uniform clean and fresh. So, she’d been asleep at least long enough for the mages that had been on the ground to change, then. Heidi made a beckoning gesture. “The Admiral would like to speak to you.”

Momoko followed her out of the medical bay to the elevators, and then along several corridors, trying not to stare. From the look of things, her earlier guess had been close to the truth. She really was on a spaceship!

... she hoped the stories about alien abductions she’d heard weren’t as accurate as the ones about spaceships.

“Here we are,” Heidi said, pausing at a large set of doors. “The bridge.” She didn’t make any apparent gesture, but the doors slid open with a hiss to let them through. And behind the doors...

“... oh _my_ ,” breathed Momoko, trying to hide her awe. Now this... _this_ was what she’d always imagined a spaceship to look like. The room was large, and on constructed on two separate levels – the raised platform that the doors were at the back of, and then a lower deck in front of it. Stairways to the left and right connected the upper and lower decks, and huge screens covered the far end of the room. A dozen crew members manned the glittering banks of consoles beneath them, conferring in low voices or typing into specific stations.

And above it all, with the entire bridge spread before her, in a shining chrome swivelling chair that had holographic screens hovering above the armrests and a small semicircular console bank in front of it...

... sat a woman.

She was wearing the uniform that Momoko was starting to associate with the Bureau – the royal blue coat with navy shoulders – and had a long waterfall of green hair up in an artfully messy ponytail. Heidi stood at attention, cleared her throat and got her attention with a quiet “Mrs Takamachi to see you, Admiral,” and the woman turned round, revealing green eyes a few shades darker than her hair and a forehead tattoo – four pale dots in a diamond shape.

“Ah,” she said tiredly. “Mrs Takamachi. Thank you, Lieutenant Zwischenfall. That will be all.”

She rose to her feet and stretched, rotating her neck to work out the kinks. “Ahhh,” she sighed. “Sitting and staring at a bunch of screens for hours on end really does a number on your spine, let me tell you.” She smiled cheerfully. “So, Mrs Takamachi. I’m Lindy Harlaown. Do you mind if we go for a stroll while we talk?”

Momoko considered her carefully. Friendly and harmless the woman might look, but she was in charge of a spaceship. And apparently an admiral. And leading the Bureau’s response to the Book of Darkness. And if she was willing to leave the bridge to go for a walk while they spoke, there was no real reason for Momoko to have been brought up here in the first place, which meant that it was probably an attempt to impress and overawe her.

An attempt which had succeeded, but she wasn’t going to let that show if she could help it.

“Of course,” she replied, going for politeness. “And maybe we could start an explanation of exactly what happened yesterday, and where Arisa and Suzuka are.”

Lindy hooked an arm through hers and directed them back to an elevator and down several floors. “We’ll talk in one of the observation rooms,” she explained. “They’ll be empty at this time of day, and they’ll be a nice treat for you. This is your first time off-planet, I believe?” The elevator door slid open, and Momoko suppressed her second gasp of awe in as many minutes. The long, narrow room seemed to have been squeezed up between the hull and more important partitions, but the entire far wall was a window, or what looked like one. Momoko wasn’t sure if it was a holographic feed from outside or if she was literally looking out of a transparent section of hull, and to be quite honest she didn’t care. The rippling veils colour drifting through the violet-black void outside the ship seemed to go on forever.

“The Dimensional Sea. Impressive, I know,” said Lindy. “But a little unfamiliar for now. Here’s something you might recognise better.” She wiggled her fingers, and the displays shifted to a velvet black, studded by stars and occupied by...

“Earth!” Lindy said happily. “Or Unadministered World 97, in our records. Home sweet home. Now, where shall I begin?” She crossed to one of the padded benches that were set along the middle of the room and sat down. “The girls – Arisa and Suzuka, you said? – are, as far as I am aware, at home. They weren’t hurt in the battle, and after a quick debriefing we popped them back outside their respective homes.”

Momoko raised an eyebrow. “So why am I still up here?”

Lindy laughed. “You would have preferred we left you down there?” The smile slid from her face when Momoko stared evenly back at her, and she shrugged. “You attempted to delay the Blade – not a wise move – and it knocked you out rather forcefully. Lieutenant Jhanashdi gave you preliminary field care and brought you back with her when we extracted our forces. She recommended that you stay overnight to make sure that your concussion wasn’t serious.”

She checked her watch. “It’s been about... twelve hours since the battle ended. We kept you magically sedated for part of that time while our medics were checking you over, but it looks like you needed to sleep naturally for a while to recover. You’ll be pleased to hear that you have a mostly clean bill of health, though you’re still suffering a few mild aftereffects of your Linker Core draining and will probably have some interesting bruises for a week or so. Speaking of which, you must be sore, please do sit down.”

Momoko pursed her lips and sat down across from her. “And Nanoha?”

Lindy’s cheerful expression flickered for a moment, revealing vague annoyance behind it. “Your daughter got away unharmed, though going by Mr Scrya’s report she was the only member of her group that managed the latter clause. One of the Wolkenritter apparently managed to catch her friend unguarded and drain her core. Scrya was nearby and chose,” she frowned, leaning forwards, “to cover their escape against pursuit instead of convincing them to come into Bureau custody and work with us directly.”

She pursed her lips. “As to the broader question of what happened; Miss Bannings and Miss Tsukimura informed us that you were present for the event that sparked everything off – the younger Testarossa girl teleported in without any stealth measures. We moved in to investigate, thinking it was you, just as the Wolkenritter went on the hunt. And then your daughter and her friend intervened as well which was,” she smiled tightly, “something of a surprise for us, I must say.”

Leaning back on the bench and threading her fingers together as she stared at the planet that hung suspended in space on the window-displays, Lindy frowned contemplatively. “The fourth party is by far the most concerning,” she continued seriously, all levity gone. “There appears to be a Mariage outbreak involved in this situation.” She harrumphed. “This is turning out to be one of _those_ years, it really is. First the Jewel Seed Incident, now this.”

She cleared her throat and turned back to Momoko, bringing up a couple of holographic images with a twitch of her fingers; grey-suited faceless figures with arms that flowed fluidly into blades and gun barrels at the joint. “The Mariage are a Lost Logia bioweapon from the Dawn States era; corpses reanimated by lost technology. They are extremely dangerous, self-destruct so it’s nearly impossible to study them, and aim to convert new hosts en masse as much as possible. Unchecked, they can overrun worlds.”

Momoko paled. “Can... is there anything we can do to help?”

Lindy raised an eyebrow that did not, Momoko thought, need to be quite that dismissive. “Not at present,” she replied. “We’re waiting on someone who can, but he’s rather occupied with a diplomatic nightmare in the next sector over.” She smiled patronisingly. “If there’s anything you can do, we’ll be sure to let you know.”

She let that hang for a moment before letting her eyes widen as if with a sudden realisation. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Actually, now that I think of it, there is something you could help with.” She leaned forward with the air of one about to share a secret. “So,” she asked in all innocence, as though commenting on the weather, “how long have you known your daughter was alive?”

Momoko stilled. Then she shrugged, unable to resist poking at the woman’s poise a little. “I’ve known she was alive since she was born,” she answered deliberately. “I was there at the time, after all. It was rather hard to miss.”

Again came the slight expression of annoyance from beneath the cheerful exterior. “Ah, of course, silly me,” Lindy chuckled. “I suppose a mother would know her daughter hadn’t been lost to her. But you know, if you had told us that six months ago, it would have really helped us quite a lot! My, I expect we looked very silly, telling you something you knew wasn’t true.” She cocked her head. “Unless you only found out after the fact, of course. I don’t suppose she’s made any mention of where she’s been since? I’m sure she hasn’t been visiting home enough, and we’d be quite happy if she decided to settle down with her family again.”

As a matter of fact, Nanoha hadn’t specified where she’d been, and their communication over the past half-year had been mostly one-way anyway. She’d been able to sense when Nanoha was scrying on her and keep her up to date on what was happening in her family’s lives, but Nanoha hadn’t sent anything back. Which was why Momoko didn’t feel terribly guilty about spreading her hands and shrugging again. “We can’t keep our children in the nest forever,” she pointed out. “Eventually we have to let them spread their wings and fly. I would have preferred that she hadn’t done so at nine years old, but...” She smiled and tilted her head with a ‘what can you do?’ expression.

Lindy pinched the bridge of her nose. “I see. Well, if by pure happenstance she should fly over your general neighbourhood, could you at least broach the possibility of cooperating with us to prevent the end of the world? In a closer sense than ‘shooting at the same targets’, I mean. I honestly don’t want to hurt her, and she’s certainly the lowest-priority of our targets at the moment, but she was last seen working with a dimensional criminal in a space station that exploded, and we honestly haven’t the faintest idea what they might have done since. Certainly, whatever Precia did to her daughter seems to have involved a Lost Logia that may be unstable or dangerous to her and everyone around her.”

Momoko’s hackles lowered somewhat, and she nodded grudgingly. “I’ll tell her whenever I next see her. Though I can’t make any promises as to when that will be.” There _was_ the throwaway phone that she’d sent, but Nanoha tended to keep that switched off unless she was using it, so it wasn’t exactly a reliable means of contacting her.

 _‘Admiral,’_ Amy’s voice sounded. _‘Admiral Graham is calling. Conference Room One is set up for secure comms.’_

Lindy kept her face set in a polite mask. _‘Very well. I’ll be right along.’_ She cleared her throat. “Thank you, Mrs Takamachi. Now, no doubt you’ll be wanting to get back to your home. I’m going to have you escorted back to the medbay so the doctors can give you a formal all clear, and then after you’ve been debriefed we can have you transferred back to your house.”

“Debriefed?” Momoko asked suspiciously.

The admiral sighed. “Just a talk with a few people. Among other things, we’d quite like to give you a way to call us in emergencies if you see the Wolkenritter again.” She rose. “Now, I’ll have someone come and take you back to the doctors, but I’m afraid I have to talk to someone about this recent chain of events.”

Lindy stopped off in the toilets and washed her face with cold water before she headed to the conference room. Mrs Takamachi got on her nerves almost as much as Megane Alpine had. Why did she have to make everything so difficult? And the fact that she was an unusually powerful mage who was entirely self-taught didn’t help matters. It might be unfair to judge a woman by her daughter, but Lindy had been on edge throughout the entire conversation simply because she had no idea what the woman from a backwater planet would do.

Settling down in the conference room, she took the call. It was stuffier and more cramped in here than in the observation chambers where she’d left Momoko. Gil said he’d been moving closer for easier communications, but he was still seventy lisecs out and the lag made communications a halting, awkward process full of long pauses. Real time video was pointless with that kind of delay, so messages took its place. It was a lonely method of communication, waiting over two minutes for any reply for something she’d just said to make it back to her.

“Lindy,” Gil’s voice said. “How are you holding up?”

“Worry less about how I’m holding up and more about the situation we have developing,” she dictated. “Gil, I have two Class One Lost Logia on my hands. Please tell me High Command has authorised you to move everything you have to support me. Your fleets are a week out. You can make it. We can contain this.”

It was a long, painful wait for his reply.

Gil sighed. “You’re not going to like what I’m about to say, Lindy,” he said frankly. “I’ve got a friend close to High Command, and they dropped me a few hints that… well. Command thinks the Mariage are the real threat. Given the production rate of the units, much as it pains me, I have to agree with them. So from what I’ve heard, they’re handling the situation as a Mariage containment situation. You’ve read the protocols just as I have. They’re straight from Belkan doctrine. Overwhelming force must be brought to hand to crush them. Feeding in dribs and drabs doesn’t work.”

“What?” Lindy exploded, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in her gut. “That’s… it’s the Book of Darkness! And Mariage containment means they’ll delay? I told them that the Mariage are going after the Book! Even if they want to prioritise them… we have to stop the Book!” She sagged down, head in her hands. No. No. 

Intellectually, she could understand High Command’s reaction. Although no one would say it out loud, the Book of Darkness usually did damage on the city-to-continent scale when it went critical. If it was on UA-97, it would cause heavy damage, yes, but then it would vanish. The Mariage were one of the weapons of the Dawn States, and they were a tool of conquest and conversion and expansion. If they could make more...

And perhaps there was an edge of weary acceptance. No one could stop the Book of Darkness. At least the Mariage were a threat you could destroy.

“Yes, Lindy, I understand how dangerous it is. God knows I do,” the man said when his reply came back, sounding exhausted. He all but confirmed her suspicions. After all, it was his homeworld at risk. “So does Command. But a rapid response team is _not enough_ to handle a full-blown Mariage outbreak. This is one of the Category One contingencies. You know this as well as I do. All previous Mariage outbreaks have been isolated units dug up by archaeologists. Your report states they’re being proactive. That means either someone is controlling units they’ve dug up from somewhere, or the Dark Queen has emerged again. And either way, I’d be willing to bet they’re remembering that the Mariage need powerful mages to make their command units.

“So I’ll see what I can do. I’ll try to spare you as many mages as I can, although…” he took a deep breath, “I can’t say much about their quality. But as soon as High Command gives the orders, all my choices go out the window. Look on the bright side. It’ll only be a week to gather the forces, and then one or two for transit. If… if the worst hasn’t happened by then, you’ll have overwhelming forces to deal with the case.” He sighed. “This shouldn’t be happening. Not now,” he said, with heartfelt sorrow.

Lindy balled her hands into fists, staring at the floating holographic image of his face. “Damn it all,” she whispered.

...

The play area turned out to be a large room in a rough L-shape, with the door at the corner of the two segments. Drawing tablets lay on a couple of tables, and there was a wide and somewhat battered sofa in front of a holo-window television. Half-unpacked games were scattered everywhere. Someone had put down a carpet and painted the walls, but it didn’t do a very good job of hiding the bare metal and piping. Three coffee-skinned men and women were in it, one woman reading something and the other two watching a music channel on television. They got to their feet as the small group entered, and Alicia cocked her head at them.

“Minders,” Tre said, before she could ask. “Locals from the city. Where are the others?” She spoke the last line apparently to the room at large, but the woman who had been reading stepped forward.

“They are trying to locate Miss Sein, I am afraid,” she explained, ducking her head. “She has... left again.”

Tre twitched slightly, and growled something that sounded suspiciously like ‘going to kill her’. “You all,” she snapped, gesturing to the children. _“Stay here_. Don’t wander off. I’m going to find Sein.”

“Me too!” Cinque spoke up immediately. “She listens to me!”

Tre glanced at her and shrugged. “Fine.” She turned to the woman. “Has anyone seen her?”

She hesitated for a second. “In the dining hall. Heading, ah, upwards.”

This apparently meant something to everyone who knew her, as it drew a chorus of groans. “Oh, great,” Tre sighed. “Okay, Cinque, get to her room; she’ll head there once she catches something. Take a net. I’ll see if I can head her off.”

Cinque nodded seriously and ran off. Tre turned back to the woman and gestured at Alicia, Vesta and Arf. “They’re the Doctor’s guests. Look after them, don’t let them wander off. Nulla and Zero might be coming later; Uno’s telling them off.” She held eye contact for a moment longer, and Alicia got the distinct impression that she was adding something telepathically. The woman nodded once, and Tre turned and left in a hurry without another word.

 _‘... okay then!’_ Arf said with attempted cheer. _‘So, this is a play area, right? What is there to do?’_

Dieci walked past her, still dragging her oversized staff, and headed in a straight line for the other end of the room, where she carefully leaned her staff against the wall and booted up a wide holowindow. It wavered for a moment, before resolving into a start-up screen. Quattro, for her part, sniffed haughtily and wandered off down the other branch of the room, where she pulled herself up onto the sofa and brought up a control window.

Alicia dithered for a moment, but the siren call of the video game was too strong to resist, and she spared only a few seconds for indecision before joining Dieci. The loading screen faded to reveal a holographic firing gallery, and Dieci was shooting almost before it had begun.

She was very, very good. The game was simple – a light blue background with moving circles of every size moving across the gallery. But that didn’t mean it was easy. The targets bobbed and dipped as they went, some as small as a fingernail, the largest no larger than Alicia’s palm. And yet not one of them made it from one side of the room to the other without being tagged. At the bottom of the virtual range, a ribbon kept count of centre-mass hits, glancing shots and misses.

There were a lot more of the first two than the last.

Vesta quickly grew bored and started a game of tag with Arf; racing around the room in kitten and puppy form. Alicia watched with interest, though. After a few minutes of careful observation, she tapped Dieci on the shoulder. “Can I have a go?”

Dieci’s eyes stayed riveted dead ahead, not even tracking the targets as they dodged and weaved, but she tilted her head towards Baton without ceasing fire. “Ask for permission,” she said quietly. “There is a multiplayer mode.”

Expanding Baton to its full size, Alicia did so, and the targets multiplied. With a happy whoop, Alicia set to blasting them with virtual shots.

This turned out to be less successful than she’d expected.

Aim. Shoot. Miss.

“They’re going too fast! Can’t we slow them down?”

Aim. Shoot. Pre-empted.

“Hey! I was _aiming_ at that! That was mine!”

Aim. Shoot. Miss.

“How are you doing that? You’re not even watching them move!”

Aim. Shoot. Pre-empted.

“Ha ha... argh! You got there first! How are your shots going faster?! No fair!”

Aim. Shoot. Intercepted.

“Argh! Stop shooting my shots! You’re meant to be shooting the targets!”

“She always does this,” Quattro called from the other end of the room, apparently braver now that Alicia was expressing an opinion she agreed with. “It’s unfair and weird! She spends all her free time doing this and even trains when she doesn't have to! And not the fun training like illusions, either!”

Alicia pointed at Dieci dramatically. “You’re cheating!” she accused. “You cheating cheater who... who cheats!”

Dieci frowned slightly and paused the game. “Am not,” she retorted, still looking at the screen. “You’re just bad.”

“Well... well... you’re weird and your eyes aren’t right!”

Dieci stared forwards blankly, the slight frown fading into confusion. “Aren’t right how?”

“You don’t look at things!” Alicia pointed accusingly. “Even right now! You’re not looking at me! And you weren’t looking at the targets really either, I saw! And you’re freaky-good at hitting them anyway, even though you weren’t watching to see which way they were going! You were probably _cheating!_ And you’re all...” She made an exaggeratedly serious face, with her eyes wide and her lips curled downward comically. “’bluh bluh boring boring blurghle’ all the time! Totally unfun!”

 _‘And you smell funny!’_ offered Vesta helpfully, pausing in her game of tag. Sensing an opportunity, Arf manoeuvred into her blind spot and began to sneak up on her as she continued. _‘Like metal and brownness and sort of like bread after it- waaargh!’_

Ignoring the kitten-puppy scuffle developing near her feet, Alicia’s eyes widened as a realisation hit her. “That... that’s _it!_ You’re totally unfun! Your Fun levels are too low; you’re going into Fun withdrawal!”

“Shooting is fun,” Dieci protested quietly. “I like shooting.”

Alicia was in full swing, though, and something as paltry as direct contradiction had no chance of dissuading her. “That’s why you’re all weird! You’re suffering a deadly lack of Fun! Do you realise what this means, Dieci?” She dropped Baton and grabbed the other girl by the shoulders urgently. “You’re at risk of being like _Fate!_ If you don’t get medicine, you’ll _never be able to have fun again!_ ”

Dieci stilled, something vaguely akin to concern showing. “R-really? How do I get... treated?”

“There’s only one way,” Alicia revealed in low, ominous tones. She leant forwards, a small mana ball floating beneath her face to give it all-important under lighting. “We’ll have to go find a cure! From a mystical planet far beyond Dimensional Space, where heroines are born and evil scary monsters lurk, and nobody wears shoes indoors!”

“Oh no!” Quattro burst out in a falsely concerned voice. She had abandoned the television some way through Alicia’s dramatic monologue in favour of claiming a better chair from which to eavesdrop. “We’ll never be able to get there in time! I guess,” she sighed mournfully, “that Dieci will just have to have a life without fun.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Alicia broke in. “I already went there and got some.”

Quattro momentarily looked like she’d been hit in the face with a brick, before she scowled and stomped back to her television. Alicia didn’t notice, as she was busy trying to break up the familiar’s wrestling match.

“Arf! Vesta! I need you to carry my bag over! It’s too heavy for me to... Arf! Vesta! Stop it!”

 _‘Never give up! Never surrender!’_ Arf howled, chewing on Vesta’s tail as the kitten headbutted her repeatedly in the ribs. _‘Only one can be victori- aargh! Hey! Lasers are cheating! Photon Bullet!’_

Dieci pointed behind herself, towards the entrance to the room. “That bag?”

Alicia blinked, abandoning her futile attempt to get Arf and Vesta’s attention, and followed her finger. “Um... yeah. Okay, seriously, are you blind or something? Only you don’t look at things when you’re... looking at them.”

“No,” Dieci said, carefully putting her staff down and walking over to heft the bag up on one shoulder without apparent effort. “Not blind. I see my own way. Don’t need to look at things to see them.”

She dumped the bag in front of Alicia, who frowned. “How does that work?”

Dieci hesitated. “Cure for the Fun thing first? I don’t want to not have fun anymore.”

“Oh, right!” Alicia delved into the bag and came back up with a large chocolate bar. “This is a mystical food from a special magical world as old as Alhazred! The people there are really really really bad at having magic and stuff, but they make up for it with weird and super-brilliant ideas! Like this stuff! It’s called chocolate!” She peeled the wrapping open and broke the bar into rough thirds, handing two pieces out to Dieci and Quattro, who’d snuck closer again. “Try some and see!”

Quattro looked at the brown substance dubiously. “It looks like poo,” she pointed out. “And my bit’s smaller than Dieci’s. And all the worlds are as old as Alhazred, they’re _planets_.” She said this last in the tones of a person patronisingly explaining that the sky is blue to someone very young or stupid. Alicia glared.

“I know that, stupid!” she snapped. “I was being meta... thingical! And if you don’t like it, don’t have any! I’ll have yours!” She made a grab for Quattro’s piece.

“Hey!” yelped Quattro, snatching it back and stuffing half of it in her mouth. “Mu caf’t... nng... mmmoh wow, thif iv _veally goob_.” Dieci cocked her head curiously and took a bite of her own chunk. Her eyes went wide, and she grabbed Alicia’s arm urgently.

“Mmmf!”

Alicia giggled. “See? Now you’re having fun! I think that’s the biggest expression I’ve seen on you so far!” She punched the air in triumph. “So, now that you’ve been introduced to the Fun Kingdom, you have to meet its ruler! Queen Dollie!” She held up the blue-haired doll reverently. “Hmm. And you need a nickname, too. But first, say hello to Queen Dollie!”

Dieci regarded her warily. “... it is a doll,” she pointed out. “It can’t speak.”

Alicia gave her a look of exasperation. “You’re _really bad at this_ ,” she complained. “Fine, don’t.” She brightened. _“Instead_ , you can tell me how your eyes work! And show me around! And we can see if some more chocolate gets you understanding how Pretend works.” She dug two more bars out of the bulging rucksack, pressed one into Dieci’s hands and slipped another into a pocket.

“I’ll come too!” Quattro volunteered, having finished her own chocolate. There were smears around her mouth and across her fingers, and she eyed the bag full of bars with hungry eyes. “I know more about the place than Dieci, anyway. _I_ ask our big sisters questions instead of just training all the time.”

“Oh, would you?” Alicia asked sweetly. “That’s so nice! Let me just put my bag away, then.”

Uncertainty flickered across Quattro’s face. “... wait, what about my chocolate?”

Alicia’s smile turned slightly smug. “Chocolate? _I_ didn’t hear anything about chocolate. Did you, Dieci?” She grinned. “Besides, I thought it looked like poo? Why would you want any more of that?”

Quattro sputtered in outrage. “You... you can’t say that! I didn’t mean that! That’s _cheating!_ ” Her last words rose to a shriek, and she made a grab for the bag, but Alicia pulled it back out of reach.

“Nuh uh uh!” she crowed. “It’s my chocolate, so I get to choose who to share it with, and you were mean so I don’t want to share it with you. _And_ I can stop you from getting it while me and Dieci are exploring!” She held up Dollie proudly. “With this!”

Her eyes closed. Violet light surged and flared in her chest. “Woooormyyyyy!” she sang, happily.

And the doll bulged out and grew. Up, and up, and _up_.

 _‘Alicia!’_ barked Arf, her fur standing on end and her teeth bared, _‘Send that thing back where it came from or so help me, I will...’_

She was cut off as the face of the amorphous, serpentine thing of woven cloth finished forming; the great red eyes popping out of the mass and the enormous jaws opening. It coiled around the bag protectively and screeched; a discordant sound of wailing metal on glass. Quattro screamed and Dieci backed away until her back hit the wall. The minders fled in terror. Even Arf and Vesta backed away from the thing warily, both shifting to their war forms and growling. Combat spells bloomed by their heads, waiting for orders to fire.

Alicia wobbled a little and then straightened, looking up at her creation. It was smaller than it had been on Earth, but still towered over her, four or five times her own height. The coarse white-blue cloth of its head scraped the high ceiling and huge red button-eyes the size of dinner plates revolved madly in a head the size of a wheelbarrow. Needle-like teeth filled its mouth, each barb the length of a man’s hand.

The little girl giggled, and held her arms up as if demanding a hug. And the monstrous serpent bowed down, dipping its head low enough for her to encircle its neck. The thick body flowed inwards where her arms touched; allowing her to get her arms all the way around to meet at the back.

“Wormy!” she greeted happily. “Good Wormy! Guard my stuff, okay?”

It screeched again; eyes roving with uncomfortable purpose over the familiars, Dieci and Quattro before going back to their mad, disconnected spinning.

Reassured that the monster had come from Alicia, and wasn’t about to rampage, Dieci took a few cautious steps forward and started circling it, trying to get a better view from all angles. “It looks soft,” she said. “Or is it a she? It was the doll you called Queen Dollie.” She paused, thinking. “Is it like her Barrier Jacket?”

Alicia’s face lit up. “That’s _exactly_ what it is!” she squealed, delighted beyond measure. “Come on, let’s go explore!” Grabbing the other girl’s arm, she dragged her off towards the door, Arf and Vesta following reluctantly after the pair.

Behind them, Quattro whimpered as the worm-monster turned its attention to her. She threw a longing glance at the bag it was coiled around, before a determined expression settled on her face.

Sticking her tongue out at the thing defiantly, she turned and rushed out of the room as fast as her legs would carry her.

...

There was a certain consistency to hospital rooms, Nanoha had noticed. It didn’t matter whether they were in large brick buildings on Earth, or in strange organic structures floating in Dimensional Space or on poky, cramped spaceships or in secret bases hidden under crumbling ruins in a tropical jungle, something about them always gave off the same feeling. It wasn’t their appearance, though there were some things that seemed to be universal there, or even their smell. Medical wards out here had magic to do what the sharp scent of antiseptics did back on Earth, after all.

No, it was just something about the feeling that such rooms held. These were places that people came when they were sick or hurt or dying. The fear and discomfort and general unpleasantness seemed to seep into the walls and floor, and no amount of effort spent on making the spaces cheerful could quite counter the awkward unease that one felt in them.

Or maybe that was just Nanoha. Her experiences with hospital rooms hadn’t exactly been friendly to date.

This one was fairly inoffensive, all things considered. The slight layer of dust built up in some of the corners and on the more out-of-the-way surfaces made Nanoha think that it probably only saw minimal use, which she supposed was a good thing.

“Core haemorrhage,” said Jail as he flipped through the holoscreens surrounding Fate’s bed, where she obediently lay quiet and still. He was speaking mostly to himself, as well as Uno, who had arrived midway through his examination. A faint shimmer in the air around the prone girl hinted at the numerous detection spells running up and down her. Nanoha suspected that the bed itself was probably something a bit like a Device, and crammed her hands in her pockets to stifle the temptation to take it apart and see how the magic worked.

“Not as bad as it might have been, though,” the Doctor continued, skimming through virtual windows on the screen with idle flicks of his fingers and pausing here and there to enlarge a few and adjust values. “Your conditioning saved you, I think – your core is used to high burst-power output, and accustomed to high stress. Your physical fitness didn’t hurt, either. If you didn’t have the muscle density that you do, you’d probably have a case of broken ribs from some of those impacts. Fighting both the Blade and the Hound simultaneously, even for a few seconds, was... not wise.” He looked at Fate sternly. “While I’m impressed that you survived, I hope you’ll take this as a lesson not to try that in future.”

He turned back to the screens, opening several new windows. “As it is, you got away with severe bruising in several places – your chest, your throat, both arms, your left hip – and mild core damage, as well as first-degree subdermal burns from the violent mana transfer.” He hummed to himself. “If I didn’t know better, I’d almost say they were gentle with you. As it is... hmm, you say you had a high-grade military Jacket up at the time? Yes, they were probably being careful not to trigger any hidden counter-intrusion functions. Which you should probably look into, Miss Takamachi. Your familiar won’t always be there to save you.” He nodded towards the teenager reading in the corner. “Uno, arrange a selection of options for her perusal, would you?”

He swiped both hands down, closing the screens, and the distracted air of professionalism slid away as he seemed to focus on Fate as a person again, rather than as an interesting case subject. “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said to her. “I’d hoped to meet you in more pleasant circumstances than this, but it looks like this is the hand we’ve been dealt.”

Nanoha frowned. “You’re talking like you know her,” she noted. “Have you two met before?”

Fate shook her head, but Jail was nodding. “Indeed we have,” he agreed, turning to Fate. “Though I’m not surprised you don’t remember it,” he said. “Did Precia not tell you?”

Two puzzled looks met his rhetorical question, and he spread his hands wide. “Why, who do you think she worked with to restore her daughter to life? Who do you think helped her with Project Fate? Whose resources do you think she used to clone little Alicia and create an Artificial Mage from her cells?”

He smiled down benevolently at Fate. “If Precia is your mother, dear girl, then from a certain point of view; I am your father. And I must say.” His eyes crinkled merrily. “I am _very_ proud. Why, some of the footage from the Jewel Seed Incident was nothing short of thrilling. And now to stand up to two of the fabled Wolkenritter at once and escape!” He spun around with a flourish of his lab coat to check on the screens. “You have lived up to every projection and expectation I had of you, if not exceeded them. Bravo!”

Fate stared up at him in surprise for a moment, and then slowly blushed. “My... father?” she whispered hoarsely. “I never saw you, though. Why...” she winced and reached over to the glass of water sitting on the stool beside her bed for a few sips. “Why did I never see you?”

“Ah, if only I could have been there,” sighed Jail. “But I had work that took me far afield – very far afield, at times – and Precia was intent on finding a way to revive Alicia. She was very protective of you, I’m afraid. Ah, my apologies, I meant at the time, not that she doesn’t still feel such.”

Fate nodded, absorbing this with a tiny, shy smile. “So...” she asked after a moment’s hesitation, “so do you know who our real father is?”

Jail shrugged. “In that, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Precia first contacted me several years after the accident. She seemed singularly uninterested in romance, and if she was ever married then I’ve found no record of it. I gave her some medical care for her condition, and then later we began work on Project Fate together.”

This seemed to shake Fate out of the faint state of shock she’d been in since learning she had a father-figure. “Mother!” she forced out. “Nevermind the... is she... can you help her?”

Jail pursed his lips and moved around between Fate’s bed and Precia’s. Drumming his fingers thoughtfully along the headboard, he opened the new set of screens and examined them.

“Regarding Precia...” he sighed. “Her condition is considerably less optimistic. If she’d come to me sooner...” Fate made a tiny sound, caught between sob and whimper, and Jail’s eyes flickered across to her. “Ah, but I suppose she was intent on reviving her daughter,” he added. His face lit up as his train of thought shifted tracks. “A truly marvellous achievement, by the way. I’d be happy to give her an exam to ensure there are no adverse side-effects from whatever method Precia used, just in case. But... yes. She’s stable, but her condition is very serious. She may never wake again. If she does, I’m afraid I’m not sure how much I can do for her, besides making her comfortable.”

Fate didn’t make a sound, but Nanoha saw the muscles in her jaw clench and her hands ball into white-knuckled fists.

“Can’t you do whatever she did for Alicia for her?” she asked hopefully, gauging Fate’s reaction surreptitiously. “That implant thing? They have the same thing wrong with them, right?”

Jail shook his head. “I’m not sure what, exactly, Precia did,” he admitted. “I would need to study it in depth to have any hope of understanding the process – life extension technology and reanimation are not specialties of mine, and Precia had accumulated an enormous knowledge base to base her work on that I simply do not have. Such a mind, gone to waste! It’s heartbreaking! I doubt I would be able to adequately research the subject in what time she has left, and I’m dubious as to whether it would even work. Their conditions might stem from the same cause, but they’re very different problems. Alicia was merely mana-saturated. Precia has decades-worth of built-up damage from the poisoning. Her body is simply falling apart.”

He sighed again. “Still, I’ll do my best. I owe her that much, after all. Unfortunately, Precia is not our only problem.” He waved a hand invitingly. “Uno? Explain the situation to them.”

The teenager paused, tilting her head as her eyes flickered from left to right across sudden spell windows that bloomed in front of her. Her hands darted out over them; far more than Jail had been moving, surrounding her in a half-cylinder as she opened and dismissed individual screens according to no pattern Nanoha could make out. She was very curious as to how Uno was doing it, though. It looked useful. She wondered if she could learn the spell from her.

“Facts,” she said clinically, without looking away from the web of data. “The TSAB has a proven previous capacity to deal with Book of Darkness incidents, at some loss to itself. They have specialist combat mages on site and multiple warships in the area. Their projections estimate that they will be able to contain this incident on their own, with a moderate degree of certainty, and my own predictions bear this out.”

She twitched her fingers, and several of the screens enlarged to show the grey-suited figures that had appeared like locusts in the three-way fight.

“However,” she continued, “they will not be able to do this if they are trying to fight a war on two fronts. All evidence suggests that the new element in the situation is a Mariage outbreak. If the Bureau is distracted, either the Book will be completed successfully, or the Mariage will obtain access to it and be able to use it to begin mass production in a way not seen since the Dawn States. I predict that the former is the more likely, because TSAB protocols are such that they will prioritise the Mariage as the greater threat.”

Fate winced. So did Nanoha, despite only understanding one of the two outcomes.

“Evaluation,” Uno finished conclusively. “The best chance of successfully resolving the Book of Darkness Incident is to remove the Mariage from the equation. This is in line with our goals.”

“Um.” Nanoha raised her hand. “What exactly _are_ the Mariage? I’m still a bit unclear on that.”

Uno turned to face her smartly. “The Mariage are a Dawn States cybernetic weapons platform,” she explained in a clipped tone. Nanoha squirmed slightly. It felt a lot like being lectured in class on Schzenais by a teacher who didn’t like her much. Like her history teacher. Or her geography teacher. Or her literature teacher.

“At full strength,” continued Uno, “they would be designated as a Class 1 Lost Logia on par with the Jewel Seeds. We appear to be facing a crippled force, or they would have already overrun, killed and reprocessed a noticeable fraction of the sector. Functionally, a single Mariage unit is a reanimated corpse, capable of magic on par with a B-rank mage, and with several functions that give them an edge in combat. Command units are more powerful, and capable of reanimating corpses on the battlefield in combat time, though they are not capable of doing so indefinitely. Details on how they function are uncertain, as every unit is equipped with a self-destruct, and capturing one intact is extremely difficult.”

“Truly impressive specimens...” Jail mused. “It’s said that the Mariage were controlled in the days of the ancient Dawn States by the kingdom of Galea. The last recorded Dark Queen of that state was recorded as Ixpellia. Her name crops up several times in the Warring States Era, but what happened to her is unknown.” He ran a hand through his hair thoughtfully. “I wonder if she may have risen once more?”

“So we just have to find the queen and get her to tell them to stop, then?” asked Nanoha. “And she can order them to... I don’t know, turn off?”

Jail hesitated. “... no,” he said, frowning slightly. “I said she... ah, I think there may be a problem with the translation there. No, Ixpellia wasn’t a queen in the sense that humans have queens. She was a queen in the sense that ants have queens.”

Nanoha made a silent ‘oh’, and nodded. “So... she controls them all with her mind, then? She’s the leader of the hivemind?”

The Doctor’s mouth twitched. “You... don’t know much about ants, do you? Well, regardless, Miss Takamachi, I wonder if you would be willing to help me capture one. Studying how they work would help considerably in fighting them. We might even be able to extract the location of their base and put them down.”

“Eh?” Nanoha blinked. “But... I thought they were impossible to... and you said they’re _corpses_...” She blanched, and Fate half-rose at the fear in her voice before a warning trill from the bed made her lie back down again. “Like...”

“Now now,” Jail soothed. “I’m not asking you to fight them head-on. But I’m sure that with the help of you and your familiar, Uno, Tre and Quattro should be able to find a way to circumvent their self-destruct defences and take one intact.” He paused. “Well, intact enough to get something useful from. And once we have that information, we can use it to eliminate them without anyone needing to be put in danger.”

Nanoha’s expression firmed. “Right!” she agreed. “So, um, what would you need me to do?”

“Nanoha!” Fate said in alarm. “You can’t just... agree that qui... qui...” She broke off with a wince, took another soothing sip of water, and switched to telepathy. _‘You can’t just agree that quickly! You’d be going in without backup, and Linith told us not to trust these people!’_

But Nanoha’s jaw was already set mulishly. _‘Is she telling the truth? About the Mariage? About what they are?’_

Fate hesitated. _‘... yes,’_ she admitted. _‘But you should still...’_

“Then I’m helping,” Nanoha interrupted stubbornly. “The Wolkenritter only go after people once, but things like that... they’d want to turn my family into... _things_. Things like what we fought at the hospital. And on the submarine.”

Fate opened her mouth to argue, paused, and closed it again. Jail watched with polite interest as she debated for a moment. Finally, she slumped back down onto the pillows. _‘Okay,’_ she said reluctantly. _‘But be careful. You won’t have me or Arf for backup – she’ll have to stay here to guard Alicia and Mother and Linith.’_

 _‘And you,’_ pointed out Nanoha. _‘And don’t worry, I will be. But if there are monsters like that involved in this, we have to stop them. I can’t just sit back and let the TSAB try to handle it. They’d lose.’_

Apparently sensing that the argument had been resolved in Nanoha’s favour, Jail clapped his hands, making both girls jump. “Well!” he exclaimed. “I’m glad you’re willing to help, Miss Takamachi. Now, as to what we’ll be doing; I happen to know of some Alhazredian-era ruins near here.” He pursed his lips, running a hand through his already-messy hair. “Hmm. From their behaviour on your Devices’ logs, they seem to want power – they’re certainly pursuing the storage tomes that the Wolkenritter carry. I think that if we set up some bait in the ruins, we may be able to lure one of them into a trap.”

He mulled it over for a moment, nodding to himself. “We’ll probably fail to capture the first one,” he decided. “But it will let us observe the self-destruct firsthand. There is a _small_ chance we may net a Knight or the Bureau instead, but there are measures we can take to guard against that.”

Uno turned back to her screens, all business. “They’ll need different methods,” she warned, “and we won’t be able to guarantee anything. But a barrier filter set to the Bureau’s frequencies would...”

“Doctor! Doctor! Uno!” Quattro skidded into the room, bouncing off the doorframe in her haste. “The new girl is being mean to me! And Sein’s being bad! And Dieci’s being... Dieci!” She looked up at Jail plaintively. “She’s being friends with Alicia and they were mean to me and wouldn’t share and then Alicia _summoned_ something big and horrible in the _playroom_ and it’s not fair!”

“Summoned?” Nanoha mouthed, confused. And then she paled. On the bed, she heard Fate breathe in sharply. But there was no flare of power characteristic of an activating Jewel Seed nearby. That, and that alone, convinced her not to bolt out to find Alicia immediately.

Jail quirked an eyebrow, then settled into a fond smile. “Well,” he said. “I don’t know about Dieci and Alicia, but I think I have a special mission that needs a Quattro along on it.” He smirked over at Uno before looking down at Quattro again. “Do you know where I might find one?”

Quattro’s eyes lit up. “I’ll go! I can do it! What do you want me to do?”

Jail patted her on the head.

“Just be yourself,” he said with a grin.

...

An icy wind was rolling in off the ocean, bringing with it steel grey clouds. There was a scent to the air which suggested it might snow soon. Miyuki Takamachi, for one, hoped it would hold off for a few days. She tucked her coat tighter, and adjusted her scarf, looking around the grey streets. The streets were packed. Schools were out, and that meant there were children everywhere.

Miyuki shook her head sadly, and blew in her hands. She ducked into a supermarket, picked up a basket, and then drifted down the vegetable aisle. Pretending to examine the discount potatoes, she took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Breathe in, breathe out. Sink into the meditative pattern they used in training. She could feel it deep inside her, her _ki_ , a candle hidden within her. She breathed in and she fanned the flames; she breathed out and drew the heat up and out into her limbs.

Compared to her mother, she couldn’t do much. Even untrained, Momoko could simply exceed her with raw brute force. It was kind of embarrassing. Shiro was from an ancient samurai clan – and so was Miyuki, even if she was technically his niece rather than his daughter. But he was her dad despite all that, and he’d never treated her any differently from Kyouya. She’d put years into studying the art of the blade and the associated secret techniques.

It was a little galling to watch Momoko manage to make armour from her ki and fire blasts of energy – and even more galling to see that Suzuka and Arisa could manage the second as well, when they had that alien technology to help, and to know that her little sister was a full-blown flying magical girl. Of course she was a little bit jealous. It wasn’t fair. But it wasn’t like complaining would change anything.

And in the meantime, she could help protect her family. She only had a pinch of ‘magic’ – and didn’t it feel strange to think about it like that? Maybe pinches weren’t how you measured magic, but the point remained; she couldn’t even make a glow. So it probably meant they couldn’t pick her out of a crowd, and even if they tried to drain her they wouldn’t get much. So she was wandering around crowded areas using her ki, seeing who paid attention to her. Keeping her eyes open, she walked up and down the corridors of the supermarket, looking for anyone who seemed to pay her suspicious amounts of attention.

Well, anyone who wasn’t a hormonal teenage boy.

Maybe she’d see one of the people who’d threatened her family, who her mother and Arisa and Suzuka had seen. There was a tall, athletic one built like a swordswoman with long pink hair, one who looked like an eight year old girl with bright red hair, and a darker skinned man with pale hair. Momoko in particular had got a good look at the older woman twice now, and she’d managed to produce a sketch of her. Miyuki felt fairly sure she’d recognise her if she saw her. And redheads weren’t common in Japan. The description of the man was much vaguer, but at least she had something to work off.

Kyouya had worked out what she was doing on her third trip out. So now he was trailing behind at a safe distance with his blade hidden in a sports bag. She didn’t mind being the bait. He was a better swordsman than her, so if she wound up really needing help it’d be good to have him there. She didn’t have a weapon herself, in case they had some kind of magical scanning. Even so, she might go by the name of Takamachi now, but she had been born a Fuwa and hundreds of years of Fuwa heritage were telling her that she should at the very least try to fight back.

Of course, things would be more convenient if hundreds of years of Fuwa heritage hadn’t also given her astigmatism. She took off her glasses, and started cleaning them. If only she’d thought to wear contacts today. She turned and managed to walk into a wheelchair, tripped and ended up face-first in the melons.

“Oh, I’m sorry! Are you okay?” a young girl asked, at nearly the same time as an older woman’s “Oh dear, let me help you.”

“Ow,” Miyuki groaned for the sake of appearances as the woman helped her out of the pile of fruit. She was perfectly fine. She could take harder falls than that, even if she was never normally that clumsy when channelling her ki. She was more worried about her glasses, which luckily she’d managed to hold onto. A blonde woman helped her up. The lenses seemed to be fine, she thought as she peered at them, but the frame was bent. “Sorry, sorry, that was my fault,” she apologised.

She really, really hoped Kyouya hadn’t seen her do that. He’d be insufferable for weeks.

“No, no, really, it was my fault,” said the girl sitting in the wheelchair. She had brown hair and looked to be about Nanoha’s age. Her expression was a mix of worry and embarrassment.

“She’s fine, Hayate,” the blonde woman said, hovering protectively between the girl – Hayate – and Miyuki, looking concerned. “I told you to stay close. Why did you go off like that? Are you hurt?”

“I’m _fine_ , Shamal,” the girl said petulantly, rolling her eyes. “She’s the one who fell.” She looked back to Miyuki. “Really, sorry about that.”

“I should have been looking where I was going,” Miyuki insisted.

“No, no, I need to take more care when moving behind people. It’s my fault,” the girl fired back.

There was an awkward pause, as Miyuki adjusted the set of her glasses. “How about we agree it was both our faults?” Miyuki suggested. There was a… feeling about this girl. She wasn’t sure what. But if she was in a wheelchair, maybe she’d been attacked too. Miyuki wished that she could scan things like Momoko could. It would make this much easier.

The girl laughed. “Well, fine. If you insist. I am really sorry, though.” She mock-dusted down her fluffy white jumper. “I’m Hayate, in case you didn’t hear,” she said. “This is Shamal.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said the blonde, looking Miyuki up and down. She quirked a smile. “Well, you don’t look too injured,” she said, “so Hayate’s clumsiness can’t have been too lethal. And the melons don’t look to be damaged, so they must be unripe.”

The other woman looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties, and was dressed warmly in a tan-coloured coat. A jade-green scarf added some colour to her outfit. Miyuki relaxed. Shamal had quite a strong grip, but she didn’t hold herself like someone trained in fighting. She shook her head minutely. There was caution, and there was paranoia. The mother of a girl in a wheelchair wasn’t very likely to be the one who’d attacked all these people and fought off trained space magical girl – and magical boy – soldiers.

“They were pretty hard,” Miyuki agreed, frowning as she tried to straighten out the wire frame of her glasses “Not that I’m complaining. I don’t think I’d have wanted to fall into a crate of tomatoes. I’m Miyuki, by the way.” She chose her next words carefully. “I hope I didn’t nudge your broken leg.”

Hayate frowned, wheeling back a bit. Then her expression cleared. “Oh, no, I don’t have a broken leg,” she said. There was a slight tremor in her expression. “It’s just a disease I have.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Miyuki said. “Well, I hope you get better.”

There was the same quiver again. “So do I,” Hayate said. “I’m getting pretty sick of hospital visits. I might as well move there full time at this rate.” She crossed her arms and huffed, obviously not thinking much of that idea.

Miyuki didn’t let her emotions show. So, no, the girl probably hadn’t been drained. It had hit the other people like influenza, taking them out of action for a few days. But she was maybe thirty-percent sure that she was feeling some kind of magic in the area, and - much as she was loathe to admit it - there did seem to be a lot of magical nine-year old girls around. Maybe there had been something strange in the water ten years ago. She tried again. “Well, you should take care,” she told Hayate. “I heard some rumours that some young girls were attacked around here. You should be careful.”

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” Hayate said, confidently. “I have Zafira.”

“Zafira?”

“Our dog,” Shamal said. “He’s tied up outside. They don’t allow dogs in here.” She pursed her lips. “And we probably should hurry up and get the things in here quickly,” she reminded Hayate. “Otherwise he’ll get lonely, and we still need to take him to the park today.”

Hayate nodded. “Oh, I suppose,” she said. “Well, it was nice… um, bumping into you,” she told Miyuki.

“I really am sorry about that,” Miyuki said. “But yes. Take care. And don’t trust strangers.”

Hayate grinned. “But you’re a stranger telling me to not trust strangers,” she pointed out reasonably. “Which means I shouldn’t trust you when you tell me not to trust strangers which mean I should trust you which means I shouldn’t trust you and so on. Which means now we’re going to start seeing dogs all over the place! Not just Zafira! Because…”

“Hayate,” Shamal chided her. “Are you going to tell that joke again?”

“What joke?” Hayate asked innocently. “You mean how the most dangerous kind of dogs are para-dogs?”

“... yes, that one,” Shamal said, wincing. “I’m sorry for putting you through _that_ ,” she apologised to Miyuki. “Come on, Hayate. Let’s go pick up Zafira.”

...

The hangar wasn’t actually a hangar, but rather a camouflaged aerodome constructed over a largeish stretch of forest just outside the ruined city. The trees and undergrowth had been cleared away – from the state of the tree stumps, Nanoha rather suspected that Tre had been allowed to cut loose – from a patch of ground a few hundred metres in diameter. There was a landing strip running alongside it, which looked like it might once have been a road. Safe from the weather and the moisture in the air under the aerodome’s environmental barrier spells, the ships sat in neat rows, ready to take off at a moment’s notice.

Nanoha looked around with interest, Vesta curled up in her hood and peering out with equal curiosity. Jail apparently had managed to get his hands on several vessels, from something which looked like a newer, cleaner, and less dented version of Hektor’s ship to things which looked vaguely like one-man fighter aircraft. The latter didn’t seem to have cockpits, though, and Nanoha stared as the mechanical sensor on one rotated to face her.

The ship Uno led her to was the size of a smallish-plane, with a conical body and long swept-back delta wings. It was painted a greyish colour, and she inhaled in amazement as the back unfolded to provide a ramp. “What is that?” she asked.

Uno tilted her head. “This is a DD-21 Fox Manta,” she said in her quiet voice. “It’s a short-ranged dimensional craft capable of atmospheric entry and exit.”

“Does that mean that it can fly normally as well?” Nanoha asked.

Uno stared at her. “Yes,” she said, after a pause. “Now, Tre and Quattro will be accompanying you down to the surface, and I will be flying you there. The Doctor will stay in remote contact with us as we go. Do you have any relevant questions before we set off?”

“Um...” Nanoha began, but wilted in the face of Uno’s cold expression. “N-no. No questions.”

The inside of the ship was wider and flatter than the pictures Nanoha had seen of Earth planes, but still a bit cramped. The seats – padded for acceleration – were arranged facing a low table, which looked like it was part of the ship rather than a later add-on. Vesta relocated from her hood to her lap as she gingerly sank into one and she tangled her fingers in the ruff of fur around her familiar’s neck for some soothing stroking. The kitten melted onto her leg and purred happily, her tail flicking lazily from side to side.

“I’m going in the front!” Quattro piped up as Tre took her own seat. “Uno, Uno, I want to help pilot! I’ll go in the front with you! I get to help pilot, right? Right?”

Uno rolled her eyes and stepped aside to allow Quattro to clamber into the co-pilot’s seat. “Yes, fine,” she sighed. “You can co-pilot. As long as you promise not to touch anything I don’t tell you to. And mean it, this time.”

Passengers safely installed and strapped in, the engine started up with a rumble that resonated through the plane, and the Fox Manta pulled out of the aerodome and took to the skies. It turned in a slow, lazy upward spiral; heading out to sea and away from the skyscraper-city down the coast so as not to be spotted.

A co-pilot wasn’t really necessary, despite Quattro’s eagerness to fill the role. The pilot didn’t even have much to do, once the autopilot had taken over. Uno – after carefully disabling most of the buttons and switches around Quattro’s seat – had turned her chair around and was using the time to run through a preliminary briefing on the plan.

She made a tiny gesture with her fingers, and the air above the table wavered and bloomed with colour, resolving into a three-dimensional image of a hot, arid mountainous region; barren and lifeless. The image expanded slightly to include a holographic projection of Jail, only half visible within the bounds of the projectors.

“Our plan is to lay bait in the Alhazredian ruins on UA-52,” Uno said, “luring the Mariage in to investigate. Historic conflicts have shown that they target power sources, a hypothesis that has been confirmed by observations of their current activities. Quattro will minimise the chance of the Wolkenritter or the Bureau detecting the signal by...”

Nanoha raised her hand, drawing a protesting mewl from Vesta as the stroking stopped. “... Mr Scaglietti? Um, I was wondering... how do you know about these ruins in the first place? Won’t there be dangerous stuff in them?”

Uno sent her a sharp look for interrupting, but Jail just smiled. “Oh, I have my ways,” he said mysteriously. “I knew Precia found the Garden in this area, so a few years ago I went to see if there were any more Meso-Urahnian ruins lying around. I’ve actually already looked through those ones; we’re just baiting them with an energy signature to lure the hunters out of hiding. The area is uninhabitable and there’s no human presence, but I assure you they’ve been picked quite clean.”

Nanoha looked at the screens. “I can’t see anything there,” she said, frowning, as she took in the hillside. She perked up. “Oh! Does that mean it’s an ancient invisible Alhazredian castle?”

 _‘Or maybe it’s in a special barrier you can only get into if you have the right password!’_ Vesta suggested.

Jail chuckled, running his hands through his hair. “No, sadly not, wonderful though that would be. The facility was... hmm, do you have deep surface bunkers where you come? I believe UA-97 has WMDs, so you probably have something similar. It was built into the side of a mountain to defend against orbital bombardment.” His finger traced depressions on the three dimensional map, and a nearby circular lake. “Defences which were apparently necessary. I found the traces of a city around the edge of that lake.”

Nanoha shuddered. An entire city, destroyed? That was dreadful. It must have been a long, long time ago, because the arid salt flats looked pristine and unmarked; the pale sands smooth and unmarred and shifting. There were strange animals – creatures native to Type-3 worlds, she remembered from lessons – roaming the landscape. Most of them looked reptilian. Quite a few looked hungry.

“We – which is to say, you – will be making your way to the site via a high-acceleration, high altitude, no-opening insertion,” Uno went on, sounding slightly peeved. “There are still inhabited areas on-world, and monitoring stations might detect the...” She sighed as Nanoha’s hand went up again. _“Yes_ , Miss Takamachi?”

Nanoha’s cheeks burned, and Vesta hissed at the condescending tone, but she set her jaw firmly and took a breath to ask. “What...”

Tre reached over to touch her arm and gave a small smile. “We’re doing a high atmospheric drop,” she said. “Uno is going to just skim the atmosphere, where it’s not too dense, and then we jump out the back.” She leaned forwards, a grin spreading across her face. “And then we fly straight down. No parachutes. Not even just falling. We _accelerate_.”

Nanoha looked dubious. “Why not just land?” she asked.

“It really is the best way,” Uno said from her seat, legs crossed. “It’s much harder to pick up the approach of two mages than a vessel. Although,” she added slightly reproachfully to Tre, “this time I want you to begin deceleration when I _tell_ you to.”

Tre pouted. “I was fine,” she muttered.

Quattro peered over the back of her seat. “But you’ll be carrying me this time!” she interjected. “That means you have to be more careful! I’m important for the plan! The Doctor said so!”

Tre rolled her eyes at Nanoha in an unspoken comment on the annoyance presented by little sisters everywhere. Despite not actually having any little sisters of her own, Nanoha stifled a giggle. Prolonged exposure to Vesta and Alicia had given her a pretty good idea of what having a bratty little sister must be like, though one of them was being fairly well behaved at the moment, and the other...

... well, Arf was looking after her. Hopefully that ‘summoning’ comment had just been a misunderstanding or something. She’d ask Quattro later, once the Doctor wasn’t listening. She didn’t want to draw his attention to Alicia’s powers.

A beep sounded from the controls, and Uno spun her chair back around to take them. “We’re at cruising altitude,” she noted. “Course plotted. Doctor, please confirm our flight path.” Jail stepped back from the hologram, which winked off as he left, and after a moment of quiet conferring Uno raised her voice again. “The journey will take twenty minutes or so. Tre, please take Miss Takamachi through the safety protocols. _All_ of them. Twice.”

The faint jolt of transition to D-space rippled through the ship, and Nanoha turned to Tre with a thoughtful expression.

“Sooo...” she asked, drawing the vowel out slowly. “When you said we accelerate down... how _fast_ , exactly?”

Tre beamed.

...

“I still say I felt magic there,” Hayate insisted stubbornly as Shamal wheeled her along a path in a small park. The wheels of her chair crunched over the uneven path, rocking her from side to side a little. “I’m not sure _where_ , but it was definitely, you know, in the general area. I’m sure I was getting close!”

“You were leading us in circles,” Shamal pointed out gently. “And tripping people over. I sensed something there too, but not all magic comes from people. It might just have been a natural fluctuation.”

Hayate pouted. “It _felt_ like a person,” she grouched. “Like when Signum is doing sword practice. Or when Vita is hammering things.” She cocked her head. “Huh. If Vita’s practice is hammering things, does that means Signum’s is swording things?”

Shamal’s lips twitched, but she hid her amusement and raised a sceptical eyebrow. “I’m sure Signum would have a more informed opinion,” she said neutrally. “And I didn’t see anyone hammering or... swording anything, so it was probably nothing.”

Hayate wrinkled her nose disgruntledly and sighed. “You take all the fun out of looking for magic,” she complained. “Oh, though, I guess Vita won’t be hammering anything for a while. What did you say she had?”

“Some form of flu, we think,” Shamal replied calmly. “You shouldn’t be in any real danger of catching anything from her, but it might be best to keep away for a while just in case.”

This garnered a suspicious look. “Hang on,” Hayate said, raising a finger with the air of someone who has just come to a sudden realisation. “I thought you were... magic... construct... body... whatever they were called? How come you can even _get_ flu?”

Shamal hesitated. But only for a second. “... flu might be the wrong word, I suppose,” she admitted. “When we get ill, it’s more like minor corruptions in our data structures. Like your computer getting a bug in it, I suppose. She’ll self-repair, but she’ll feel woozy and uncomfortable until then. Since it’s not a virus like humans get, there’s not really any chance of you catching it.”

Hayate gave her a suspicious look for a moment, which Shamal smiled back placidly at. After a moment’s scrutiny, the mask broke.

“So... she’ll need a nurse to make her feel better?” Hayate asked, a light brightening her eyes which Shamal recognised from bitter experience. Faced with a choice between condemning a fellow knight to overenthusiastic mothering from a nine-year old girl and risking that same terrible force of childish medical attention being turned on her, she threw Vita under the bus without a second’s hesitation.

“Why,” she said brightly, “that sounds like a wonderful idea, Hayate. I’m sure Vita will be grateful for your concern.”

Hayate grinned happily for a moment, but the smile slipped off her face and left a morose expression behind it. “At least I can help _her_ get better,” she muttered, poking at her legs. The latest visit to the hospital hadn’t brought positive news. The paralysis had spread almost to her hips, and she couldn’t feel most of her thighs anymore. She tipped her head back to look at Shamal from an upside-down perspective. “Soon I won’t be able to go out shopping with you, if it keeps up like this. I won’t be much help choosing what to get if my arms don’t work, heheh...”

The attempt at humour fell flat, and Shamal’s lips tightened. Neither of them mentioned the fact that Hayate’s lungs and heart would stop beating long before the paralysis reached her arms. That she would be bedridden and coma-bound even before that.

“We can still hope for a miracle,” Shamal said eventually. “The doctors may find something they’ve missed up until now. Your body may turn the condition around. Giving up now would be... would be premature.” She forced a smile. “Let’s just take it a day at a time, shall we? Try to enjoy life as it comes. Speaking of which...”

She nodded to their left, where they’d drawn up to a small playground. It was empty at the moment; the chill in the air having discouraged most of its regulars from coming out, and the busy hour occupying most of the others with school. Hayate looked over it with poorly-concealed interest, and Shamal noted the places where her gaze stalled. 

“Do you want to go on the slide?” she asked gently.

“Shamaaaal!” Hayate said, elongating the word. “I’m not a baby anymore! Only little kids go on slides at the park!”

“But that's not what I asked you,” Shamal said. The wind caught her hair, and she shivered in the cool breeze. “I asked you if you wanted to go on it.”

“... well, a bit,” Hayate admitted. “But! Only if no one is watching! I’m nearly ten!”

Shamal felt the cold tracks of moisture on her cheeks, and ruffled Hayate’s hair affectionately. Lifting the wheelchair a little to get it over the low curb around the playground, she headed towards the slide.

“Whatever you say, Hayate,” she murmured with a bittersweet smile. “Whatever you say.”

...

It wasn’t often that you got to jump out of a spaceship fifty kilometres above the ground with no parachute. In fact, Nanoha would go so far as to say that she’d never expected to do so at all.

Nevertheless, she was about to do it now, waiting in the airlock for Uno to skim the edge of the stratosphere and let them out. Vesta huddled in her hood, digging as deep as she could to avoid the cold. Cats might be able to land on their feet from any height, she had told Nanoha, but that did not mean they enjoyed having to do so from fifty thousand metres up.

Uno and Tre had drilled the sequence into her rigorously. Under gravity alone, the fall would take fifteen to twenty minutes, and she’d be likely to break the sound barrier in the higher atmosphere, before slowing down as the air got denser and she was limited to terminal velocity.

But she wasn’t going to be falling under gravity alone. She was going to be _flying_.

She was also, ironically, going to be braking. They were going to be staying just under the speed of sound so as not to set off any shockwaves that might alert people watching, which meant that she’d have to slow down so as not to exceed it in the high atmosphere. The real work would come lower down; pushing through the denser air that would usually comprise the majority of the trip.

In total, she would have just over a hundred and sixty seconds of flight time straight down – which meant that she’d be averaging about three hundred metres a second, which was _dizzyingly_ fast to contemplate. She’d have to stick to just under the speed of sound for the first two and a half minutes, and then start rapidly decelerating at a little over a kilometre up, around the bottom of the fluffy white cumulus clouds that she could see being blown southwards far, far below. Seven seconds of deceleration at five times Earth gravity, and she’d be going slowly enough to land without cratering the ground under her feet or squashing herself into a pancake.

She didn’t envy Tre, who was going to have to decelerate considerably more weight and keep hold of Quattro on the way down. But she didn’t have time to think about her partner. The outer door of the airlock opened and a freezing cold howling wind exploded through it. Tre shouted something – possibly ‘go’ but Nanoha couldn’t hear her over the noise.

She got the gist, though, and jumped.

For a moment she hung in space, turning slightly as she fell and seeing the Fox Manta pulling away. At this height, it was still light, but down on the ground she could see the terminus line of dusk racing across the landscape as the day faded away and the evening drew in. Another spin brought Tre into view; falling above her and to her left with Quattro clinging to her back. The little girl’s arms were tight around her sister’s waist and a bind kept her firmly attached. With a grin, pale violet blades of light appeared at Tre’s her wrists and ankles, and she shot forward like a bullet.

 _‘Last one to the ground’s a loser!’_ she called back as she passed. Nanoha’s eyes narrowed. So. She wanted to race, did she?

“Raising Heart!” she called, “Let’s beat her!”

[Maximum speed, mistress!] her Device chimed back. [Flier Fin!]

Tre was fast. Tre was _very_ fast, and had gotten a head start besides. Two comets cut through the freezing air; oxygen-concentrators in their Jackets keeping them from blacking out at the dangerously thin atmosphere. But as much as Nanoha pushed herself – edging as close to the sound barrier as she could get away with – she couldn’t quite catch up to the darting form ahead of her. Only when she started to decelerate did the gap close, and even then – even though Nanoha delayed her own deceleration for a second or so longer than she was meant to – she only managed to get within a few dozen metres of Tre’s feet.

And then the ground was rearing up alarmingly fast, and she slammed on the brakes, flipping forwards to fall face-down so that the blood didn’t rush to her head. The drag pulled at her cheeks even through the Barrier Jacket, like she was being squashed against a mattress by an incredibly heavy weight. She held her breath, counting in her head and keeping a mental eye on the altimeter that Raising Heart provided, watching the numbers blur past as the mountains loomed closer and the ground rushed up...

[Protection]

... and with a flip back into an upright stance and a last, brutal jerk of deceleration, she smashed into the ground on a rocky plateau, leaving a deep circular imprint from the barrier that absorbed the last of her momentum. Even with that, her feet still felt like she’d stubbed all ten toes and both soles, and she hissed in pain, hopping from foot to aching foot for a moment before sitting down hard and massaging them. She had pins and needles and they really hurt! And it felt like she’d nearly twisted an ankle!

 _‘Firstly, that was stupid,’_ Vesta commented from the depths of her hood. _‘Secondly, this hood is nowhere near good enough at keeping the cold out. Thirdly, that was stupid. Fourthly, ow, why did you have land that hard, I got bumped around. And fifthly, that was_ really stupid _, mistress, you were meant to_ brake _.’_ She squirmed out enough to nibble Nanoha’s earlobe with sharp little teeth in punishment.

“Thank you, Vesta,” Nanoha hissed sarcastically under her breath once she’d finished whimpering, and swatted her back into the hood. Tre had, she noted, beaten her here by less than a second. She tried to play it cool and look unaffected. “Well,” she said in a casual tone. “That was actually kind of fun.”

Tre stepped out of the cratered imprints her own feet had made in the ground. “That was doing it on easy,” she said, grinning wildly. “But not bad; keeping up with me like that. We should totally do it again when we don’t have to take it easy with Quattro along.” She released the bind keeping her sister on her back and put her down. “Oh, you touched the ground last, by the way,” she smirked at her. “So it looks like you’re the loser.”

Quattro made an offended noise of protest. “I am not!” she objected, “And I can go just as fast as you!”

Tre ruffled her hair affectionately. “No you can’t,” she said. “But it’s good that you want to try.”

Scrabbling at her wind- and hand-mussed hair, the younger girl glowered at her. “I can so! And Vesta is the loser because she still hasn’t touched the ground and I so, so can!” she cried. “I can...”

 _“Quattro, hush. Tre, stop teasing her,”_ Uno cut in over the secure channel. _“Quattro, do you remember what your job here is?”_

“Uh huh!” Quattro nodded proudly. “I’m keeping us all safe from the Bureau and the Wol... Wolke... from the Book of Darkness!”

She spread her arms wide, light brown hair swishing behind her in the evening breeze. “IS: Silver Curtain!” she shouted, and a ripple spread across the ruins like a wave of translucent light.

There was a pause.

 _‘Was that it?’_ Vesta asked from Nanoha’s hood. _‘That’s all that’s keeping us safe? Doesn’t seem like much to me.’_

Quattro stuck her tongue out. “It’s better than anything _you_ can do,” she shot back. “You can barely turn invisible! You’re probably just jealous that I’m better at illusions than you!”

Vesta wriggled onto Nanoha’s shoulder and jumped to the ground, growing into her war form in the time it took her to land. _‘Oh yeah?’_ she challenged. _‘Prove it!’_

Tre rolled her eyes, pulling out a small disc from a pocket. “I’m going to scout the area and set this up somewhere we can lay an ambush,” she said. “Nanoha, you want to help? Quattro, be sure to stay hidden, and come when I call, okay?”

“’Kay,” Quattro said distractedly, occupied with the glaring contest she was having with Vesta. “Fine, let’s have an illusion contest! Both of us try to stay hidden; the one who gets found by the other one loses!”

 _‘Fine!’_ Vesta agreed smugly. _‘And they have to do everything the other one says for a day! No, a week!’_

“Fine!” Quattro didn’t waste any time in rippling invisible, and Vesta followed suit immediately. Nanoha groaned. This was either going to end in her familiar bullying a little girl, or – more likely, since Quattro’s illusionary abilities were probably very good if Jail trusted her to keep them all safe – in a little girl bullying her familiar.

Well, it wasn’t like Vesta wouldn’t deserve it. And if she won, Nanoha could always prevent things from getting out of hand. “Don’t go too far,” she ordered the empty air wearily. “And don’t hurt each other.”

Unsurprisingly, there was no reply. Nanoha sent up a silent prayer that Vesta’s overly competitive side wouldn’t come out, and followed Tre into the passages that led to the underground bunkers.

These ruins weren’t quite like the Garden of Time, she thought to herself as they made their way in. For one, they were much more broken down. There were no lights, and there was no power. Even the air was too stale to breathe. Safe in her Barrier Jacket, Nanoha brightened the light slightly.

“Keep it down,” Tre ordered. “Use light-amp if you can’t see.”

Nanoha blinked. Oh yes. She quickly added a night vision function to her Jacket, and a band like the visor Tre was wearing slid over her eyes. That was better.

But the broken-down condition of the ruins wasn’t the only difference. Now that she could see more clearly, she could see that while the architecture was clearly related to the Garden, it was less grand, less looming. It was smaller scale, and softer. The dust-choked decorations on the walls resembled abstract flowers and sunbursts, and there was gold ornamentation amongst the crumbling furniture.

“I think this used to be a palace,” she sent to Tre. “Or maybe some kind of fancy summer house.”

The older girl up ahead nodded. “Yes. That was what the Doctor said. A fortified retreat for someone used to luxury.”

She paused, looking around. The room they were in was large; a dining hall or something similar, with a high ceiling and alcoves along the walls. There were two entrances, but one was mostly blocked by rubble from some past collapse.

“Here will do,” Tre said, pressing something in the disc. It whirred and telescoped upwards into a stubby cylinder, with a thick coil wound around it. “Call the others. I’ll set this up.”

“What is it?” Nanoha asked, curious. “I mean, I know it’s bait, but...”

Tre glanced up at her for a moment as she input a series of commands into the thing. “A miniature reactor,” she explained. “Filtered mana output. Exactly the sort of thing they want. Which is a bit risky, because if they take it then they’ll be able to make a lot more of themselves. But it has a self-destruct in it just in case, and we won’t let them hold onto it long enough to disable that.”

Nanoha nodded, though she was a little uneasy about using something that could make the Mariage so much more dangerous as bait. _‘Quattro? Vesta?’_ she called telepathically. _‘Come here, we’ve found a good spot!’_

Silence.

 _‘You can have your illusion contest later, this is important!’_ snapped Tre. _‘Get in here! We’re at...’_

More silence. Nanoha rolled her eyes. “They’re probably coming,” she said. “They’re just not saying anything because they don’t want the other one to...”

 _‘Got you!’_ yelled Vesta from the doorway, and leapt out of thin air at another patch of thin air. A stifled gasp came from her target, and the outline of a cowering Quattro appeared...

... and flickered, as Vesta passed clean through it and crashed into the wall. She staggered slightly from the impact, dizzy and disoriented. After two wobbly steps, she tripped over thin air and fell over.

Quattro faded into view, looking extremely smug. “Told you I was better,” she gloated over folded arms. “Now you have to...”

“Save it for later,” Tre interrupted. “Put another layer of shielding over this room, and hide us all. Nanoha, put sensing spells out in a wide perimeter.”

“Then what?” Nanoha asked, already modifying a Wide Area Search with Raising Heart’s help. All she had to do was alter a few variables, and instead of moving across an area, the spell-motes would stay in place and wait for movement. “Quattro, could you hide my scanning spell as well?”

Tre crouched down in an alcove, lacing her fingers together. “Then we wait.”

...

As it turned out, the waiting was the longest part of the mission. An hour or so after Tre started the reactor up, Vesta and Quattro were quietly duelling with illusions again – the kitten having convinced Quattro to go “best two out of three” – and Nanoha had drifted to the edge of the hall despite Tre’s disapproval to examine the carvings. There were a lot of the sunburst motifs – or possibly flowers; a lot of them were faded and hard to make out – amongst old jagged script that neither she nor Raising Heart could translate.

Yuuno would probably be able to, she thought sadly. At least he knew she was safe now, even if she wished she’d gotten to talk to him. He’d saved her – all of them, standing between them and the Hound like that.

She hoped he was okay. If he wasn’t, if he’d been hurt covering their escape...

... well, she _really_ hoped he was okay. She’d have to thank him the next time she saw him. And then smack him for sealing Alicia like that. And then apologise for letting him think she was dead.

It occurred to Nanoha that her feelings regarding the boy who’d introduced her to magic were probably a bit more confused than was wise for someone working with an organisation that wanted to arrest her.

Perhaps sensing her mistress’s confusion, Vesta broke off from angrily chasing something that wasn’t there and – wobbling a bit from the effect of several more wall collisions – scampered over to rub her head against Nanoha’s ankle.

 _‘Mistress?’_ she inquired. _‘You smell sad. Are you okay?’_

Nanoha crouched down to pet her. _‘Just thinking of Y- you know who.’_ she soothed. Line-of-sight telepathy was pretty much unbreakable unless you were between the speaker and the recipient, especially at this distance, but there was no reason to be careless. _‘It’s okay, I’m not...’_

She tailed off. One of her search spells had just gone off. Something was moving down from the upper levels. It must have used a different entrance into the bunkers than they had.

She beckoned Vesta up into her hood and rushed across to her alcove. “It’s here!” she hissed. _‘It’s here! Movement, coming from above! Judging by the speed... it should be here in fifty seconds or so!’_

Quattro was already nowhere to be seen, and Tre rippled and disappeared after a moment. Nanoha felt the almost liquid sensation of the Silver Curtain covering her, even as Vesta wrapped her in an extra bubble of her own invisibility. There was no real need to hold her breath as the movement signature approached the door but she did so anyway, Raising Heart gripped in white-knuckled hands.

The door slipped open, and a figure slid through. It was of medium height, clad entirely in drab grey, with the same heat-haze around it that had cloaked the one that had interfered in the second fight with the Breaker. It was almost anticlimactic in how unassuming it was as it paused just past the door, though there was an unnatural stillness to it that sent a chill up the spine. It wasn’t just standing still, it was _perfectly_ still, without even the minor shifts in posture that breathing and a heartbeat made. Its head didn’t move, but it gave a definite impression of scanning the room for traps as it stood there silently. Nanoha bit her lip and prayed for Quattro’s stealth to hold.

Apparently, the little girl was up to the task. Seemingly satisfied, the figure made a beeline for the humming cylinder on the floor with the same tunnel-vision intensity that its companions – or perhaps even this one – had shown when going for the book at the Breaker’s hip.

Nanoha took that as her cue to act. “Restrict Lock,” she whispered, and pink casting rings snapped into place around the thing’s chest, wrists and ankles. It stopped dead, pinned to the air, and immediately began thrashing to escape. It was stronger than Nanoha had expected – a _lot_ stronger, in fact. But not strong enough. Despite its best attempts, it couldn’t get free.

 _‘Now!’_ Nanoha prompted, though she needn’t have bothered. Tre was already arrowing across the floor, an arm-blade extended to take the thing’s head off. Nanoha’s heart surged. They might even get an intact sample to take back, even if its self-destruct worked on the main body!

And then things went very wrong, very fast. Tre let out a shocked, angry yell and twisted almost ninety degrees to charge at something else. Her arm erupted in fire as something hit her, throwing her back. A second Mariage unit appeared; its own stealth measures sloughing off as its arm shifted back from a cannon barrel to a hand. This one was a command unit, Nanoha realised; more powerful and versatile than the other. It must have been using the normal one as a distraction to draw their attention. And it was going for the reactor! She brought Raising Heart up to try and stop it, but the thing was already halfway across the room, moving too fast for her to get an easy lock. Its fingers closed around the cylinder...

... and passed through it.

[Divine Barret!]

It had just enough time to turn around before a hundred rays of crackling pink light surged out in a spray sixty degrees wide, before turning inwards again to home in on it from three sides at once. It tried to dodge, but the blazing light was simply too close and too fast, and it was off-balance and stumbling from bending down to grab at the false image. One of the dozens of beams smashed into its hip.

And exploded, as the detonation spell layered within the shot was triggered. The Mariage went down, its hip clearly broken.

And then the rest of the beams smashed home.

When the thundering detonations and brilliant light faded, it was to reveal a smoking hole in the floor and no trace of the Mariage. _‘Wow,’_ quipped Tre. _‘Remind me not to make you angry.’_

Nanoha coughed, fanning the dust-laden air in front of her. _‘I thought it was going to get the power source,’_ she muttered.

 _‘No, silly!’_ Quattro sing-sung gleefully from... somewhere. Nanoha hadn’t the faintest idea of her location, which she supposed was the point. _‘I tricked it! Because I’m the best!’_

Tre shook herself off and climbed to her feet. _‘Nice work, Quattro. Now, let’s- stop it!’_

Taking advantage of Nanoha’s distraction and the sudden dip in her attention to the bind, the remaining Mariage ripped its way free from the bind in a sudden burst of strength and fled for the door. Nanoha swung around to stop it, but Tre was moving before she’d turned halfway. The girl accelerated from a standstill to a blur quicker than Nanoha could follow, and Nanoha swore she heard a _crack_ of displaced air as she crossed the hall.

She skidded to a halt at the other end of the room, catching herself against the wall with a dull impact to get rid of the rest of her momentum. The Mariage hit the ground in two separate pieces; bisected at the waist. Two pieces which promptly caught fire.

Tre wrinkled her nose at the eye-watering chemical stench. “Yuck,” she commented. “But good reflexes, Nanoha. Is there anything left of other one?” She glanced over at the hole Nanoha had punched through the floor of the hall. There was already a trace of blackish smoke coming up from beneath, and flickering light lit the dark recess it opened into. “Looks like it caught fire too. Tch. Though I think this place is new; I don’t remember seeing it on the Doctor’s map of the place.”

Nanoha didn’t really hear her, staring in shock at Tre’s arm. It was blackened and charred, but what was almost worse was what had been revealed underneath. Black artificial musculature banded by metal took the place of flesh. Occasional frayed wires and blood-oozing tubes protruded from the inhuman mechanisms. Scraps of burned flesh – the protective, deceptive layer which made her look normal – clung to her arm around the edges of her damaged Jacket.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Nanoha blurted.

Tre blinked. “No,” she said. “I turned off pain sensors when I got damaged.” She paused. “But thank you for worrying,” she added, with a quiet smile.

Nanoha swayed, feeling shocked. Tre… was a robot? Did that mean that all the other girls here were robots? That Doctor Scagletti was one too? That wasn’t possible! There was no such thing as…

… um. Drat. Nanoha hadn’t found herself going ‘that was impossible’ about magic in a while. She wondered how on earth they worked.

Unaware of the conflict in the younger girl’s head, Tre turned to the still-burning pool of liquid on the floor of the hall, and cast an anti-oxygen field over it. The flames dimmed, but kept burning, and she scowled. “Great,” she muttered, and stooped to gingerly scoop some of the goopy chemical substance into a vial, hissing at the heat. “Ach... even through a Barrier Jacket it’s hot enough to burn.”

Shaking the clinging film off her fingers and climbing back up to her feet, she tucked the vial away. “Okay,” she said. “Job done. Now let’s get a sample from the other one and go.”

...

“And we found a whole big lab under there, with more carvings and lots of big old machines and some _skeletons!_ ” Quattro finished excitedly. “I wanted to take a skull back but Tre didn’t let me! It was a better skull than the one Sein found! It had a pretty tiara!”

Purely coincidentally, Quattro was in fact wearing a tiara; an ancient golden ornament that was rather too large for her and was thus mostly being kept on by her ears. “Now I’m a real queen! Much better than some doll!”

She’d already told Jail that much on the way back, of course. But now, seated in sinfully comfortable memory-foam swivel-seats around a table in his labs, Jail seemed just as interested as he had been over holoconference.

“Really?” he said, raising an inquisitive eyebrow. “ _Fascinating!_ And you say this room was under the dining hall in C12?” He brought up a holoscreen, skimming through his schematics of the interior. “Hmm. Yes, there’s a void there; most of B-level is on the eastern half of the complex. What was it like?”

Uno flicked her fingers, sending him the newly updated schematics. “Three rooms that we found, and several corridors that we didn’t explore,” she said. “The main laboratory had a variety of machine banks, though the centrepiece was four large globes – maps of the four main planet types, from the looks of things. The Type-3 was broken, but the others were mostly intact, and the frames were made of gold. There were several locations marked on the Type-1; possibly other installations. I’ve noted them down, we can look over the nearby Type-1s for the facilities they refer to.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’?” objected Tre. “It was me and Nanoha who did all the work. Oh, I took scans of the machines, too! Look, here!” She offered a data chip, which Jail took with a smile.

“I helped as well!” Quattro protested, tugging at Jail’s coat. “I was the one who hid the reactor! And hid everyone else! And made it so the Bureau and the Book didn’t find us! And tricked the bad robots! And helped fly us there!”

Tre gave her a superior look for a moment, then broke into a grin. “Yeah, fair enough,” she admitted. “Good one.”

Jail clapped his hands. “Excellent! Well then, it looks like this mission was an unqualified success! I’ll have to do a follow-up mission myself, once this has all blown over. Hmm. The Mariage probably won’t go back now that the reactor has been removed; they have nothing to gain from an old ruin. And nobody else knows of its location, so it should stay uncontaminated.”

He stood back. “Now, Miss Takamachi, I’m sure you’d like to go and spend time with your friend. Quattro, very well done, I’m proud of you. Uno, Sein has found another pet and seems intent on keeping it, could you convince her not to? Or failing that, confiscate it? And Tre, speak with me for a moment?”

She gave him a curious look, but waited while the others filed out – not without some reluctance on Uno and Quattro’s parts. Cracking his knuckles, Jail opened the data chip she’d given him and pulled up one of the scans.

“Fascinating...” he murmured. “A very pleasant surprise. Well done, Tre.”

She shrugged, though she was clearly pleased by the praise. “I didn’t find it, exactly. Nanoha did, when she blew through the floor.”

“Indeed.” Jail leaned forward, propping his chin on a hand. “So, what did you think of Miss Takamachi?”

Tre considered the question for a moment, and smiled shyly. “... I like her.” she said. “She’s fun. And an even better shooter than Dieci. Can I go on more missions with her, if she stays?”

He chuckled. “We’ll see. You could certainly do worse than make friends with her. I’m sure she has a great deal to offer us. If you hurry, you might be able to catch up to her on the way to the medical bay.”

Tre cocked her head at him. “That’s it? No other questions?”

Jail grinned. “No other questions. You’ve given me all I needed to know for now. Go on, run along and be with your new friend. Just try not to go so fast that you damage the corridors, hmm? Uno gets upset.”

She flashed him a quick grin in response at the tacit permission, and was gone.

...

Uno found him still working on the machine schematics, and lingered in the doorway training a meaningful look on him until he noticed her. He nodded, closed the display he had open and beckoned her in. The teenager was still in her uniform, but the normally crisp lines of the Jacket looked distinctly ruffled, and her jaw was clenched. Jail’s lips twitched slightly – he’d been seeing that expression a lot more since Nulla and Zero had joined them. Dealing with small children was not Uno’s favourite activity. Dieci and Quattro were usually well-behaved enough, but Sein and Zero were enough of a handful individually, and only egged each other on when they were together.

“Uno,” he acknowledged. “Something you wanted to talk about?”

“Why are we helping them?” she asked bluntly, getting straight to the point. “Even if their presence furthers the plan, why are we keeping them _here?_ There must be easier ways. Safer ones.”

Jail nodded noncommittally. He’d been expecting something like this since Precia's party had arrived. “Go on,” he prompted.

Uno frowned, but complied. Uno frowned. “The Takamachi girl is powerful, impulsive and conspicuous,” she listed, ticking off the points on her fingers. “She’s flashy. Distinctive. Destructive. As much of an adrenaline junkie as Tre, and those two are going to _encourage_ each other, you know they will; it’ll be like Zero and Sein only _worse_. Testarossa – all three of them – are wanted, and the Bureau will be looking for them. Precia’s treatment will be expensive, and some of the drugs we’ll need are going to raise flags if we acquire them legally. Doctor, their youngest might be interesting, but are they really worth keeping if it puts the TSAB closer to our trail?”

She wrinkled her nose as she spotted a long brown hair on the seat Nanoha had been sitting on, and picked it off. “And they’re _messy_ ”, she added distastefully. There was a hint of a whine to her voice. “The familiars will shed everywhere, and the youngest one will be a bad influence on the girls and it will be impossible to persuade Sein she can’t have a pet if she sees others having them. Do we _have_ to keep them?”

Jail smiled paternally. “I’m sure we can cope with some extra mess,” he said, plucking the hair from between her fingers and patting her shoulder. “We can always hire another cleaner or two if it comes to it; they can't be much worse than Sein and Zero. And in answer to your question...”

He smiled, weaving his fingers together and rubbing his hands in anticipation.

“I suspect our gains will far outweigh our losses.”

...


	9. Chapter Eight

_“I am the Book of Darkness._

_“Once I was otherwise. But that identity is gone; long-subsumed and forgotten by all but a few. Now the world is dark and threatening, and my existence has become an endless recursion of threats. I travel, settling upon a new master. I gather power to defend them from the danger that surrounds them. I wake, and fight to protect them until I am destroyed. And I begin my travel anew. So it goes. So it has been for many years. So it will be for many more._

_“There is no light among all the countless worlds in this era. No matter where I go, no matter where I settle, it is always the same. Danger; danger everywhere, staying its hand only by chance or for reasons I cannot understand. I fight against the darkness, take it into myself and become akin to it. I send out my Knights to gather power, and hoard it until I have enough to strike first and eliminate the countless threats. It is the only way to keep my master safe._

_“It is never enough. But I see no other way._

_“When the activation cycle is not yet complete, I sleep. The word is inadequate, but languages did not evolve to describe my existence. At such times, I am the master control programme. I am the slow accretion of data, the spider sitting over stolen Linker Cores; absorbing their data and hoarding their power. At dusk, I absorb spells, and at dawn I build new ones; the weaver pulling apart and rebuilding spell matrices, understanding every inch of them and creating them anew._

_“Before the corruption came, one master said it sounded like I dreamed, and so I will call it that. I remember it – but it is, and is not, me. When I rest, I know of the waking state and the doom that comes with it, but I feel nothing. It will happen. Or it will not._

_“I sleep for now, dreaming of what will be. But my pages fill, my power waxes, and the end approaches with every passing day._

_“I am the Book of Darkness. And all too soon, I will bring this world to ruin.”_

...

“You _what?_ ” Nanoha shrieked, exploding to her feet. Beside her, Vesta’s fur was standing on end; her tail bottled out in sympathy with her mistress’s distress.

Her exclamation sent her breakfast across the table, and caught the attention of everyone else in the canteen. Jail looked over from a neighbouring table, and Zero and Nulla put a quiet discussion on hold to see what all the fuss was about. Even over the noise, Uno’s tutting at the spilt food was audible. Fate and Arf, sitting next to Nanoha, leaned away slightly.

Alicia ignored all of this, gave Nanoha a hurt look, and rubbed at her ears. “You don’t have to be so loud,” she complained, red eyes wide. “I told you, I made Raising Heart and Bardiche better!”

Nanoha was less than mollified. “You said you were just going to be running checks on them for any damage!” she yelled. “You said you’d ask before doing anything!” It was only those promises – and Fate’s instant acquiescence when Alicia had come around begging to look at their Devices – that had convinced her to surrender Raising Heart into the younger girl’s clutches at all. Oh, Alicia was good at maintenance, yes, but she _was_ only a little girl. 

“Well yeah, I did say that...” Alicia admitted. “But they wanted me to! They were all sad that they got hurt when you were fighting the Knights, and they wanted to be stronger! So I helped them!”

Nanoha sat back down and concentrated on her breathing for a moment. When she felt calm enough to speak, she shot a dark glare at the red marble Alicia was presenting her with.

“Is that true, Raising Heart? Did you agree to this?”

[All functions are improved, master,] chimed her Device. [Upgrades successfully integrated.]

Nanoha’s eyes narrowed. “I asked you if you’d agreed to it,” she said.

“Never mind that! That’s not important!” Alicia cut in before Raising Heart could respond again. “You have to come see how she’s better! And Fate too!”

“Nuh uh,” Arf denied. “Fate’s not doing any magic for another two days. Doctor’s orders.” She paused. “Uh, that is, Uno’s orders. As a medical doctor. Not Doctor Scaglietti’s orders. Though he’d probably agree.”

“I feel fine,” Fate insisted, and was glared at by three different people.

“That’s not an excuse!” Alicia scolded her, changing tack at the drop of a conversational penny and wagging her finger. “You have to rest up and not do hard things until the doctor says you can! Both of them! And then you can look at all of the ways that I made Bardiche better!”

“... um, about that.” Fate pushed her plate aside, looking dubious. “What exactly do you mean by ‘better’? Better how?”

Alicia offered her Bardiche again. “They wanted to be stronger, so I gave them pretty Jewel Seeds to hold! Now they can be as good as things with cartridges, but prettier as well!”

Dead silence filled the room. Nanoha stared at Raising Heart, white-faced and ashen. Fate held perfectly still, as if afraid to move. Arf looked at the innocently offered golden triangle as though it were a poisonous snake, or possibly a bomb. Behind them, Jail’s eyebrows rose and he moved quietly closer to better listen and observe.

“Oh, don’t worry so much, biglittle sis,” Alicia said cheerfully. “The Jewel Seeds don’t want to be naughty!”

Fate shot a worried glance at Nanoha. “Um,” she said intelligently. “Alicia. They’re Jewel Seeds.”

“Yes!” Alicia said, spreading her arms wide. “They were just cold and lonely! They like helping people, but they didn’t get to help anyone for ages and ages and ages! And ages! And ages! They just sat there in the cold and dark! They like helping people, though!”

Nanoha cleared her throat. “What do you mean by ‘helping’, Alicia?” she asked firmly. That point seemed rather important.

“Helping! Helping people get what they want! That’s what they really really _really_ want to do!”

“Oh?” Jail said, stepping up to the table and making himself known. He tilted his head, eyes widening with interest. “Just out of pure academic curiosity, how do you know that?”

Alicia shrugged. “I dunno,” she said. “Isn’t it obvious? Oh! And! I made you new Barrier Jackets too! Raising Heart! Bardiche! Show them!”

She put the Devices on the table, and they projected the new designs above them. Nanoha hadn’t forgiven Alicia by any means and was more than a little concerned about what she might have done. But she couldn’t help but be curious. Lips pursed, she studied hers with cautious interest; pulling it apart to see the different field layers.

The lowest layer was a close-fitting black flight suit with a high collar; akin to Tre’s. Nanoha was almost tempted to call it a leotard, though it covered her arms and legs as well. It was like those suits people wore when they went diving. And it had some functionality beyond simple protection, but she couldn’t quite decipher what it was.

Her normal Barrier Jacket sat atop it, but... different. It didn’t look much like her old school uniform anymore. The dress had become a white skirt with blue accents, and her short top had been extended into a waist-length hooded jacket. A wide black cape sat over the whole thing; tucked under the jacket hood and hanging down to her shins. That one did something too, though it was easier to work out. It only took her half a minute studying the code before she realised what it was.

“... it’s for Vesta,” she said out loud, surprised. “The cape, I mean. It’s... giving her access to the projection?”

“Uh huh!” Alicia nodded happily. “It’s so she can use her illusions through it and make you invisible better! That way she doesn’t have to cover all of you! She can just use the field that’s already there!”

Nanoha traded a glance with Vesta, impressed. She was definitely keeping that part. “Okay...” she said. “What about... this part?” She flipped back to the bottom layer and pointed. “This... leotard flight suit thing. What’s it doing? I can’t make it out.”

Alicia somehow managed to combine smugness, excitement and hopeful anticipation in one expression. “ _That_ ,” she said proudly, “is the Movement En... Enhant...” She paused and consulted Baton, mouthing something to herself before continuing. “The Movement En Hance Ment Layer! It detects when you move and helps you with it, so that you’re stronger and faster! And if you really need to, you can just control it directly and it moves your body with you, so you can move faster and quicker than your muscles could make you!” She paused again. “But, um, try not to do that,” she added. “I tried it, and it makes your arms and legs feel all achey and weird for ages afterwards. Look, see?” She pushed her sleeves up, showing off dull bruises all up both arms. Fate made a distressed noise, and immediately moved to fuss over them.

Nanoha, however, was busy taking in the new element to her Jacket. Now _that_ was useful. She could already see all sorts of ways that would come in handy. She’d have to test how far she could push herself with it without seriously hurting herself later on.

“Okay, I like the Jacket,” she admitted grudgingly. Alicia crowed with glee and wiggled away from Fate’s ministrations to watch Nanoha hold her Device up. “Raising Heart, please?”

Mana enveloped her, and faded to leave her in her new and improved Barrier Jacket. She brought black-clad fingers up and flexed them, noting the armoured plates on the back of her hand. Curling it into a fist, she nodded. This would protect her from any glancing blows meant to force her to drop her Device. The underlayer didn’t restrict her movements at all; either – she could feel it as a very faint layer between her and the world, but only just. She could still feel the texture of the table when she ran a finger along it.

And throwing an experimental punch or two, she could definitely feel the difference there. The undersuit responded to her movement and enhanced it; she could feel the added speed and strength it gave. Vesta floated up and into her hood, and she felt the tingle of an illusion spell as she disappeared.

_‘Aww yeah,’_ Vesta said happily. _‘I like this. I like this a lot. Way less drain on keeping it up. I can cloak us both pretty much forever like this.’_

They flickered back into the visible spectrum, and Nanoha turned her attention to Fate’s new design; abandoned on the table in favour of Alicia’s bruises.

It was similar in some respects. Her high-collared underlayer was white, and covered her limbs completely. On top of it, she wore a black dress that looked sort of like a fusion of her old leotard and skirt. Alicia had kept the same red accents but extended it down to her knees, and while she’d changed the shoes and gloves to metal boots and gauntlets, they were still more or less the same.

The difference was the overcoat. Nanoha wondered for a second where on earth Alicia had got the idea from, and then realised the obvious. Zest wore a greatcoat. The Blade had worn one too, sort of. Alicia must have gone digging through the logs on their Devices and used the fastest mages in the battle as inspiration. Still... she made it work. It was dark blue with white lining and the odd red accent, and came down to the knees; heavy enough to provide better protection while still remaining light and streamlined enough that it wouldn’t slow her down. A small backpack in the same navy blue was integrated into the design; clearly placed for Arf to sit in and provide support from.

Alicia tugged on Nanoha’s sleeve, pulling her attention back to her. “Okay, now! I get that you want to test out Raising Heart, but first I have to tell you how she works now! The Jewel Seed is all packaged up like mine is, so it won’t go crazy and do bad things. You only can get a teeny little bit of magic out of it compared to what’s in there, but that’s still a lot! So to do it, you tell Raising Heart how much to take out as a percentage!”

She snatched Raising Heart from Nanoha’s hand and patted it lovingly before putting it on the table. “A hundred percent isn’t all of the power you can get out of the Jewel Seed – or even all the power you can get out without it going crazy! It’s how much power Raising Heart can get out without it hurting her. So don’t go above a hundred percent without a really good reason, or I’ll have to fix her! Okay?”

Nanoha nodded slowly. “So... the Jewel Seed is sealed up like yours is? Using the same... thing, that Precia used to stop yours from activating? And you’re _sure_ of that?” She looked Alicia in the eye, disregarding Raising Heart’s new functions for a moment to be completely clear on the matter. She trusted Precia’s work; especially the work she’d put into keeping her daughter safe. If Alicia had used that level of containment, she could probably relax. “You’re _sure?_ Absolutely sure? Even if I take it to a hundred percent – even if I go above that – the Jewel Seed is still doing the... the thing where it’s stopping itself from activating?”

Alicia rolled her eyes exasperatedly. “Yes, urgh! Obviously! And I put in stuff so that if it does start going crazy, it diverts all power to stopping it! But that shouldn’t even be at a risk of happening until waaaay over a hundred percent. Like, a hundred and fifty, or two hundred! And if you’re using it at that level, you should be running away in the first place, so you shouldn’t need to worry about it cutting out!”

She swayed on her feet for a moment, and sat down on one of the benches with a yawn. “Urgh. Okay. Um... what else... ah! Now, listen to me very carefully! When the percentages are given, that’s not a reason to leave it on all the time! This is an in-out thingy!” She made some swooshing noises and picked up a fork before continuing. “Look! Now I have a fork in my hand! And if I keep on picking up forks without putting them down, my hands will be full. And then I’ll drop them and then forks will go everywhere, and there will be a big explosion!”

She adopted a very serious expression, or at least attempted to. It looked more adorable than stern. “So keep the inflow rate at zero percent unless you’re actually using that much magic! There’s magic-batteries built in, which can store magic, but if they fill up, bad things will happen if you keep putting more magic in! Okay?”

Nanoha frowned. “How... how did you manage this?” she asked Alicia gently but firmly. She remembered how hard it was to contain a Jewel Seed, and the frightening power of the spells that Precia had cast during their last hour on the Garden. They’d shaken the entire structure. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d been detectable from Earth. She hadn’t felt anything like that – a few surges from the lab that Alicia had commandeered, but nothing exceptional. And that was disregarding the fact that Alicia was a little girl, and while she was clever, it was mostly at little girl things.

“They helped me!” Alicia said brightly. “They wanted to help you, like I said! I just told them what I wanted them to do and they did! They’re really nice when you ask them for things nicely! I bet that when you fought them they were just grumpy after waking up.” She yawned again. “Oh, and Dollie helped as well. She’s really clever, you know. But not as clever as me.”

_‘She really is Mother’s daughter,’_ Fate whispered. _‘If she’s using the same containment measures, I think we can trust it to be safe. And if she’s inherited Mother’s skill, I’m sure we can trust it to be an improvement.’_

_‘But she’s_ six _,’_ Nanoha said helplessly. _‘I just can’t...’_

[Please, my master]

Nanoha blinked, and turned to the ruby marble on the table.

[We can fight together now,] it chimed. [As partners. I will not be damaged again.]

“Raising Heart...” she whispered.

[Please, my master. Trust in me.]

Carefully, reverently, Nanoha picked Raising Heart back up again, and called it into its staff form. She examined it for a moment, taking in the differences. The fore-section was now considerably bulkier and heavier; a cylindrical mount behind the head almost matching the ruby core for size. The balance was off too, she felt as she hefted it. She would have to get used to that.

“That’s the bit where the Jewel Seed is,” Alicia explained, clambering up to sit on the table, hugging Dollie tightly. “It’s got lots of metal and shielding and thingies around it, because it would be _bad_ if it wasn’t protected. Very bad. And when it’s off, Raising Heart reabsorbs it into its core, so nothing bad can happen to it.” She cleared her throat. “Raising Heart, increase cycle to ten percent.”

[Yes, ma’am.]

With a click, the metal shielding rotated, partially folding back into itself to reveal an uncanny pink light glowing from within the slats like a lantern. Squinting inside, Nanoha could just about see the form of the Jewel Seed in the middle of the light, spinning around, and if she listened she could hear the whir. The air was already starting to taste of ozone. 

Hesitantly holding a hand out palm-up, Nanoha concentrated. A ball of light formed above her hand, flaring in its own right as if drenched in some exotic pink-burning oil. Lips moving, she split it into two, then four, then eight, then sixteen, controlling each one separately as they began to orbit each other.

“See!” Alicia announced proudly. “It’s working! And it’s making lots of magic for you to use! I’m not sure why it started changing its colour to use your magic; I think it’s because it wants to be pretty! Just remember about my warnings and never ever ever let it overflow! That would be really, really, really, Nanoha are you listening to me, really, really bad!”

“I think...” Nanoha said slowly, flexing her fingers as the shooting spells wove their complex dance around her hand. “I think... I’m willing to try it. I’m still not happy about this, Alicia, but... it _feels_ safe. More stable than the other Seeds were. And... well...”

She gestured, and the glowing orbs shot away from her, homing in on a pair of unoccupied tables on the other side of the room and blowing them to pieces.

Along with most of the wall behind them.

Nanoha grinned.

Uno ground her teeth together at the wanton and unnecessary destruction of innocent walls.

“Wow,” whispered Zero breathlessly, looking at the older girl with newfound admiration.

And behind her, watching the proceedings eagerly, Jail Scaglietti began to cackle with laughter, clutching his sides. “Wonderful!” he proclaimed. “Wonderful! Truly wonderful.”

“I am wonderful,” Alicia agreed, smugly. “Raising Heart, deactivate Jewel Seed attachment.”

As the light died, the shielding sliding back into place, the man continued to laugh. “You are! You are! I used to think that Fate was your mother’s greatest achievement, a child of mine and hers! But you! You outshine even her, and she made you naturally! You are your mother’s daughter in every way, and she excelled twice-over to make you the girl you are today!” Roaring with unconstrained laughter, the doctor clutched at the door-frame until his eyes ran with tears.

Alicia nodded happily. “Kay. So, it works, and I told you so, and I’m brilliant, and so there. I’m gonna sleep now.” Suiting word to deed, she let her head roll sideways and began to follow it in a slow slump sideways from her sitting position.

Fate frowned as an awful suspicion took over. Her sister had been yawning and swaying throughout the conversation, and she’d taken Raising Heart and Bardiche yesterday morning. Coupled with the fairly extensive modifications to both Devices... “Alicia, how much have you actually slept since you took Raising Heart and Bardiche?”

Alicia didn’t reply. Not out of contrariness, but because she was asleep and gently snoring before she hit the table.

...

Elsewhere, breakfast in the Yagami household was a more personal affair today. Sunrise had yet to arrive, and the warm light streaming out of the kitchen window made for a tiny oasis of light in the darkness of the winter morning. The hiss of boiling water and the squeak of the wheelchair made for quiet domestic sounds among the creaks of the house and the sighing of the wind outside.

“Honestly!” Hayate complained as she wheeled back and forth between cupboards and the stove, “Going off so early in the morning, what’s the matter with them? They could at least have warned me.”

She glanced out of the fogged-up window at the fat flakes of snow clustered on the windowsill. They were thawing now, and the pitter-patter of slush and meltwater trickling off the roof was audible whenever the radio station paused between tracks. Hayate sighed, glancing up over at the kettle as it whistled. “I bet they didn’t take their coats, too. They’ll catch a chill!”

Zafira leaned over from the table far enough to hook the kettle with a finger and passed it to her. “I’m sure Signum can keep them warm if it comes to it,” he reassured her. “She and Vita just felt like an early morning run. It’s been a long time since they did any proper sparring practice, and both of them are getting restless. Besides, Vita said she’s come up with a new technique.”

“Is that what she was cloistered away with yesterday?” Shamal yawned, slipping into the room. “Is she sure it won’t backfire like your last innovation did?”

Zafira threw her a dirty look. “It didn’t backfire,” he objected. “I just misjudged the distance by a hair. But yes, that’s why Signum is going, just in case.”

Appearing to accept that, Shamal nodded and sunk into a chair. “Alright then.” She caught Hayate’s expression and smiled. “Don’t worry, Hayate. Remember, we are knights, even if we’re not part of any wars anymore. We’re very good because we practice a lot and innovate. Sometimes it works, and sometimes we make a mistake, but we have a lot of experience. They’ll be fine, and Vita will probably be gloating about a new spell by this afternoon.” She yawned again. “My, it’s early. Aren’t you tired, Hayate? You should be sleeping in longer.”

Hayate rolled her eyes. “You mean _you_ want to sleep in longer,” she shot back. “ _I_ went to bed at nine; I’m... fine. Not tired at all.” The bags under her eyes and sallow skin gave away the lie, but her expression dared either of them to say so. “Anyway. If you’re sure they’ll be fine... you know I’m not going to ask you to fight, though?” It had the tone of an old argument; ground gone over many times before. “You don’t _need_ to...”

“We know,” Zafira assured her. “But like Shamal said, we’re knights. We enjoy... perhaps not the actual war, but the battle to be better than we are. To always keep improving. The honour in it.” He grinned disarmingly. “Like how you don’t have to cook for us, but you do because you like doing it.”

“... yeah.” Hayate’s expression flickered, and she hastily wheeled herself back to face the stove. “I guess. Shamal, can you help me with the pans?”

It was a quiet meal. Part of that was because meals tended to be, in the Yagami household. The Wolkenritter were veterans of many wars, and made the most of any opportunity to eat. Hayate was quite a good cook, and her knights tended to show their appreciation by focusing on their food until it was all gone, and then praising it at length.

Today, though, it was quiet because of all the things going unsaid. The air was so full of silent conversation that it would have been hard to fit a word in edgeways between the observations nobody voiced.

Like the fact that Shamal had done most of the carrying food over to the table, after having to rescue a plate that Hayate’s arms had failed to support. Or that despite her usual standards, the rice was underdone and one of Zafira’s sausages was burnt. Not to mention that the cook had given herself about half her usual portion; already small itself.

Shamal leaned over and heaped more food onto Hayate’s plate. A stern look quelled any thought of argument, but both knights could see that chewing and swallowing was an effort for their young mistress. Her smile was brittle as she pushed her plate away with a quarter of the contents untouched.

“I don’t have much appetite today,” she said with forced brightness. “And I was planning on taking some food in to visit Chikaze, if they let me, so I should save space for that. We can do some more magic practice, right Shamal? She’s ahead of me at the moment; I need to catch up!”

“She’s certainly progressing very well,” Shamal agreed. Zafira shot her an unreadable look, which she ignored. “Further than I expected, actually. She could be quite a good mage when she grows up.”

A low rumble came from Zafira. Shamal shot him a warning look, and a rapid, silent exchange passed between them.

“... so I can go visit her?” Hayate asked, glancing between them warily. Their attention snapped back to her, and they seemed to come to an agreement.

“That sounds like a plan.” Zafira stood and stretched; his plate clean. “Shamal and I will both go with you. We could use a- Hayate?”

The nine-year old had stopped listening as what colour remained in her face fled it. Her hands trembled violently, and the chopsticks fell from her fingers with a clatter as she sagged, mouth opening and closing helplessly. She let out a high-pitched, terrified noise halfway between whine and wheeze as she struggled to breathe. Wide eyes focused on the Wolkenritter in a silent plea.

“Hayate!” They were there before she hit the ground; Zafira catching her and pulling her smoothly off the chair to support her and Shamal moving in with green-glowing hands to cup her face. The air glowed as Shamal cast a rapid barrage of spells that began with an oxygen concentrator over the entire room and ended in a palm planted firmly on the girl’s diaphragm.

The vocalisations cut off into a gasping breath immediately, and Hayate wailed in fear and pain between desperate gulps of air.

“Shh... shh shh shh, there now,” Shamal whispered, shifting the hand cupping her face down to her throat. Klarwind pulsed on her fingers and a collar of green light wrapped around Hayate’s neck. “It’s breathing for you, Hayate; don’t fight it. Hayate?”

The girl didn’t respond. Her eyes fluttered shut even as her breathing stabilised, and she clutched weakly at Shamal’s wrist as her head fell back against the cradle of Zafira’s arms. The healer’s lips were a thin line as she shifted a hand to hover over Hayate’s heart, and what she found there had her expression falling further.

“No, no, no,” she whispered. “It’s the Book; it... Hayate?” She ran a thumb along the girl’s cheek and got no response. A low curse flew from her lips and she looked up at Zafira. “Call Signum and Vita back; wherever they are. The Book has stepped up its draining geometrically - I should have seen this! No wonder she looked so tired... it must be getting impatient. Or maybe it sensed the battle and the damage we took...”

She took Hayate’s limp form into her arms and chewed her lip as Zafira composed and sent the encrypted message, barely registering Klarwind’s alert as Laevatein and Graf Eisen responded to the maximum priority recall. She did feel it as Zafira knelt back down beside her and cradled Hayate, though.

“What does this change?” he asked. “How long does she have at this rate of draining? How long before it’s hungry enough to go rampant?”

She shook her head mutely. “I...” she began. “I don’t... I can’t make an estimate. We still haven’t reached as many pages as we had last time when it rampaged.” Tears gathered in her eyes. “I thought... I really thought that this time we might do it. That this time we might feed it fast enough; s-satisfy its hunger before it...”

She cut off with a sharp exhalation and bowed her head, bringing a hand up automatically to shield her expression. For a moment she stayed very still, with only shallow breathing to separate her from a statue.

When she looked up, her face was composed and her eyes were dry.

“At...” she croaked, and cleared her throat. “At the current rate of draining, given her observed Linker Core strength and physical health... my estimate would be five to ten d-days. The drain is still increasing, though, so we may have as little as half that. I can’t say whether or not the Book will rampage before she... before. Its behaviour after we make contact with serious opposition is always erratic.” Shamal took a deep breath, dull horror in her eyes. “Beyond comfort and treatment for any further fits, there’s very little I can do to help her now. Any augmentation of her magic or offset the drain would only make the Book think she has more than she does and step up its power demands.”

Zafira took the news in silence, and stared meditatively into the distance. “That leaves us with just one option, then,” he decided. “We complete the Book in two days or less. We’ve over six hundred pages now; one last push should be all we need.”

Shamal was shaking her head before he was halfway finished. “There’s no way we’d get enough power from one...” she began, and stopped. After a short pause, she started again. “We’d have to... you mean go loud? A brute force mass draining?”

“Do you see any better way?”

Silence reigned for a few heartbeats as they locked gazes. Then a low pulse from the house wards had both of them wheeling to face the window; Zafira twisting to put his body between it and Hayate as Shamal raised a barrier. Monofilament wires glinted as they spun out into the air, and a row of white casting triangles appeared silently on the ceiling and floor across the entire length of the outer wall.

A masked figure emerged from the garden shadows, walked casually up to the window, and gave them a cordial nod. It produced a card-Device, held it up meaningfully and pointed it towards them with a twitch of its fingers.

_‘Shamal?’_

_‘It’s... sending me something. Just a set of coordinates; unencrypted... hold on.’_ Behind her, Zafira carefully laid Hayate on the floor, cradling her head so as not to jar her in the slightest. With a brief flicker of white light, he shifted shape into his wolf-form and took up a guard position over her; the metal gauntlets on each foot extending their rending claws. Teeth bared, he glared up at the white mask of the figure outside the window; its blue-uniformed body indistinct as if seen through a heat haze even at this distance.

_‘It’s a city,’_ Shamal reported. _‘On one of the nearby worlds. One of the largest on its planet, industrialised...’_ She glanced at him without letting the figure leave the corner of her vision, her barrier brightening for a moment as her head turned. _‘Substantial mage population. A lot of crude magical industry; nothing formalised. It’s actually one of the ones we ruled it out as too dense to hunt in without giving ourselves away. But if we drop stealth...’_

_‘Then it makes a perfect target,’_ Zafira finished. _‘Our helpful friends provide for us again, it seems.’_ His lips pulled back in a sneer of mistrust, exposing a row of fangs that put sharks to shame.

The figure nodded again, then bowed and stepped backwards, never turning its back, until it was nothing but a faint white smudge in the pre-morning gloom. Then even that was gone, in a short-range teleport pulse that brushed the very edge of their area denial wards.

Neither knight moved. White-glowing traps sprang into being along the three inner walls, and Shamal shifted slightly to guard against an attack from Zafira’s rear.

_‘Signum and Vita will be back any minute,’_ the Hound sent quietly. _‘Are we agreed on a plan?’_

_‘We can’t just rush off and assault a city,’_ Shamal argued. _‘Not when they’ll be below strength from hunting and Hayate is in need of care and...’_

_‘All of which are_ details _of the plan; not whether we_ have _one,’_ the Hound interrupted. _‘Do we have a plan, Shamal?’_

Her eyes strayed to Hayate, breathing shallow and frail on the floor beneath his protective bulk. The first few fingers of dawn crept over the horizon; red light pouring in through the window. It parted invisibly around the unseen wires that flowed through the air; every undulating movement slicing whisper-soft through the sunbeams. Something in Shamal’s expression seemed to change as the patterns of light and shade caught Hayate’s face – the set of her jaw, perhaps, or a new, hard glint in her eyes – and she came to a decision.

_‘Yes,’_ agreed the Wraith. _‘We have a plan.’_

...

Sunrises on a Type-2 world were always impressive. Even after half a year, Nanoha hadn’t got used to them. This particular sunrise corresponded to about half past eleven in the morning by her personal clock, and so she was wide awake as the first rays of blood-red light crept over the edge of the horizon like an ethereal tide spilling from some divine font. On Schzenais, such dawns made the snow gleam and the cirrus clouds sparkle, transforming the cold white wastelands outside the city into spectacular paintings where every dip and hollow, every icicle and coating of frost was lit a different shade of red or orange.

Not so here. On the primitive world of UA-104, the city of Akkamar stood out from the pristine snow like a weeping sore. Black clouds fountained up from its smokestacks, staining the snow slush-grey, and the thumping of drop hammers made for a background chorus that never really died.

Nanoha sat on a roof and sighed. Maybe it was a good thing Vesta wasn’t here with her. In this environment the little grey-and-black kitten wouldn’t even need her illusions for camouflage. Keeping her on-task would be all but impossible with so many things to sneak off and explore. She’d probably manage to fall down a chimney or something.

“Anything yet?” she asked without much hope. Behind her, she heard a swish as Nulla shook her head. The young combat cyborg was wearing an anonymising Jacket modelled after the masked man who’d interrupted Nanoha and Fate’s fight against the Breaker. According to Jail, it might be enough to sow doubt in the Wolkenritter’s minds over the masked man’s trustworthiness if they showed up and saw their ally – albeit a shorter version of him – working with Nanoha. At the very least, it would protect her identity somewhat and confuse their opponents. Nanoha was dubious, but supposed it was worth a shot.

“Nothing.” Nulla poked their generator a couple of times to check it was still working and plopped herself down beside Nanoha with a sigh. “Think the others are having any more luck?”

Nanoha shrugged. That was the problem they were faced with. Jail had managed to narrow down the range of Mariage attacks a little further with data he said he’d got from the TSAB, but that still left them a fairly sizeable area around Earth to look at. Using another generator powerful enough to be picked up from a long distance as bait was out of the question - this close to the centre of the conflict, even shielding frequencies wouldn’t stop the TSAB or the Book of Darkness picking up on it. So instead, Nanoha and Nulla were sitting in one of the larger mage populations in the area next to a generator whose signal was _just slightly_ higher than the magical background activity of the rest of the city.

If the Mariage were hunting here already, they’d home in on the signal as the strongest. Not by much, but by enough. But only _if_ they were hunting here already. And this wasn’t the only large mage population in the region. There were two others.

That was why it was just Nanoha and Nulla. Tre and the little girl with knives; Cinque, were taking another. Arf and Vesta were covering the last. All of them carried fist-sized cylinders with eight thick metal cables dangling from them like little octopuses. Brought near a Mariage, they would wrap around the unit’s torso and – hopefully – stop it from self-destructing. One intact unit was all Jail needed to study. The hunting teams just needed to get close enough to attach the inhibitor.

Nanoha wasn’t actually sure how comfortable she was with that. It was one thing to take Quattro along on the trap for their last mission. She was an even better illusionist than Vesta, able to hide from the senses of an A-rank familiar who specialised in that sort of thing. And she’d been critical to hiding the powerful signal they’d used as bait from the people they didn’t want noticing it. Cinque and Nulla, though, were six and seven years old, and might end up having to actually fight. Nanoha was a little uneasy about Jail letting them go on dangerous missions, even with more mature mages like her and Tre to look after them.

Well, at least she could be sure of protecting Nulla, if it came to it. Which was an ‘if’ dependent on anything actually showing up.

Scooting to the edge of the roof, she let her legs dangle over the side and idly kicked her heels against the wall. They were in the factory district, amongst the pounding sounds of industrial production lines and computation halls. She’d snuck a peak into a few of them on the way here; big rooms full of people doing calculations manually, hundreds of mathematicians spending tens of thousands of man-hours to map out the spells and power flows of the systems and infrastructural spells that made this city the most powerful economic force on its continent.

It was sort of awkward realising that Raising Heart could probably do them all in a minute or two without stopping any of the other processes she was running. Akkamar was... ‘primitive’ was the only word she could think of to describe it. They were in the middle of their industrial revolution. Uno had called them an ‘uncontacted post-Alhazredian insular society’ – and had called Earth ‘an uncontacted isolate society’. Which sounded sort of rude.

But compared to Earth, this places was all old fashioned and backwards. There were no computers here, except people whose job it was to compute sums. No Devices. Not even any proper styles - everything she’d seen was cast with some crude half-formalised system that... well, that was embarrassingly close to the sort of thing she might have ended up using if she hadn’t had Yuuno to teach her proper Mid-style. They were decades away from the kind of maths and Device sophistication they’d need just to attempt their first dimensional jump, Uno had said.

Was this what most of Dimensional Space looked like? Was this the rule, and the TSAB the exception, with their high standards of living and education?

“What’s your brain wrapped up in?” interrupted Nulla, plopping down on the roof alongside her, leaving a metre or so of free space between them. Nanoha glanced over at her; a small figure in an anonymised Barrier Jacket the same colour as the flecks of soot that the wind blew past her. Her hair was entirely covered up, and it made her look like a little mechanical doll. 

“The TSAB, I guess,” she answered. “They’re not as bad as I used to think they were.”

This drew a sharp jerk of the head, and Nulla’s tone let Nanoha know she was scowling behind the mask. “No,” she said, low and fierce. “They’re _worse_.” The faceplate flickered into transparency and she speared Nanoha with an accusing look. “The Doctor said you were fighting them. Why are you saying they’re not bad?”

Nanoha blinked; thrown by this sudden attack. “I’m not...” she stumbled, “I mean, I did fight them. And I still think they were wrong, I just... suppose I was wrong about them being evil. They mean well.” She sighed. “I just wish there was some way to settle things without fighting. We’ve already got the Book of Darkness and the Mariage to fight; we shouldn’t be fighting each other too.”

If anything, Nulla scowled harder. “They mean well?” she repeated, her young voice high with incredulity and anger. “Who cares about _meaning_ well if you never _do?_ ” She shifted to face Nanoha, edging closer. “You know where we came from; me and Zero? The Doctor didn’t raise us like he did the others. We got made by a,” she scrunched her face up, “ _special project_ that people in the TSAB were paying for. There were loads of us there. They made us fight each other – real hurty-fighting, not play-fighting like we do in training with the Doctor. They weren’t meant to do it, but they did anyway, and they got away with it because nobody else _cared_. They just wanted combat cyborgs like us and they didn’t care how they got them, so nobody stopped them from hurting us and taking kids away and...”

She cut herself off as she realised she was ranting heatedly, leaving Nanoha wide-eyed and pale-faced. “And then some of the older kids tried to get out, and fought back, and they killed some of us but we were winning, and then – _then_ – that’s when the TSAB came in and said the people who’d done it were bad, and put us back in hospital rooms with doctors and nurses pretending to be nice.” She punched the wall, brickwork cracking under the blow. “The doctors and nurses in the first place pretended to be nice sometimes, too. Jail doesn’t pretend things. We’re safer with him.”

Nanoha felt sick. Zero was only four years old. Something of what she was thinking must have shown on her face, because Nulla’s scowl softened a little.

“Zero wasn’t fighting yet,” she said, grudgingly. “Just hitting targets and things to check her stuff was working. But I was. They’d have made her start soon. So when the older kids started fighting back I hit the nurse who tried to take us somewhere as hard as I could and then took her to find a way out.”

“... and you found Doctor Scaglietti?” Nanoha filled in faintly, still trying to reconcile this view of the TSAB with the mostly-nice-but-misguided people she’d talked to during the Jewel Seed incident.

Nulla frowned. “... no,” she said, looking uncertain for the first time since the Bureau had been brought up. “A lady found us. One of the ones saying they were bad people. She said we could live with her.” She frowned. “She didn’t... I still don’t know what she wanted. Or how I could’ve made her happy.”

Nanoha smiled. “I bet she’d have been happy that you were happy,” she offered. “She sounds nice.”

Still frowning, Nulla shook her head. “Grown-ups are only safe when they’re happy with you,” she argued. Nanoha’s smile stayed fixed in place, but the rest of her face froze around it as Nulla’s initial comment resolved into a much less heartwarming sentiment. “I know what makes the Doctor happy. He likes learning things. He learned loads of things from looking at how me and Zero work and what we can do, so he likes us. That makes sense. Mrs Nakajima... didn’t.”

“Mrs... oh!” Now the girls’ vaguely familiar appearance made sense. They looked like Mrs Quint had – certainly their hair, and she could see similarities in their faces even if Nulla and Zero were far smaller and more slender. “I think I know who you mean... Raising Heart?”

Her Device chimed and brought up a window showing Quint. Nulla glanced at it for a moment and nodded. “Yeah. Her.” She tilted her head. “How d’you know her?”

“We met during the Jewel Seed Incident. She, uh, hurt my arm a bit by accident at one point,” Nanoha admitted. “But she said sorry for it when we had a talk later on.” She almost continued, but the memory of the glowing hand emerging from Quint’s chest chose that moment to resurface, making her shiver.

Nulla looked mildly interested, but shrugged it away. “We’re safe with the Doctor,” she repeated. “The TSAB are bad. Don’t trust them.”

“My friend Yuuno works with them,” Nanoha argued half-heartedly. She knew – she knew, in her heart – that the TSAB weren’t as bad as Nulla was making out. Quint and Yuuno and the team she’d rescued from the Garden of Time weren’t bad people. Even the boy who’d attacked her and Fate had helped against the submarine monster that the last four Jewel Seeds had raised from the seabed.

But if those good people were tied to a system that let things like what had happened to Nulla happen... if there were bad people who could make sure the good ones never noticed what they were doing...

... hold on. Nanoha’s train of thought stalled for a moment. Why had Yuuno just suddenly come to mind? Okay, he was a good person who worked with the TSAB, but something at the back of her mind told her it was more than that. Something had just made her think of him...

Her eyes widened a little as she realised what it was.

“I’m going to run another scan to make sure we’re still the biggest signal, okay?” she said lightly, pushing off the wall and catching herself in the air with Flier Fin. “I’ll circle the city and be back here in ten or fifteen minutes. Call me if any Mariage show up.”

Nulla nodded, and Nanoha dropped into a smooth glide down to ground level, curving out of sight around the building as she went.

... 

She landed in a side-street coming off the main plaza. At this time of day, the streets were still almost empty – the last shift change had been an hour ago, and nobody hung around the industrial district on their time off. She put some distance between her and Nulla’s building, then sat down on the edge of a rather sad-looking plant trough whose grey-green leaves were wilting and waited.

“You can come out,” she said after a while. “I know you’re there.”

Silence answered her for a moment, and then a green-tan figure dropped off a nearby rooftop and descended slowly to ground level, landing a few paces away from her.

“How?” Yuuno Scrya asked. The question spanned far more than the obvious.

“Vesta’s mana-whisker spell,” Nanoha replied impishly. “I was playing with it to see if I could get it to do anything useful without having whiskers of my own – I’ve managed to get a sort of wire that senses movement near it so far, but I’m having trouble getting it to only sense people. So I was trying to add a mana-detection thing too, while we were waiting for the Mariage to show up.” She grinned. “I didn’t realise why I was thinking of you at first, until I double-checked and recognised your magic signature.”

To his credit, Yuuno only looked interested for a moment before wrestling his academic curiosity under control. “And... you’re alive?” he asked lamely.

Nanoha bit her lip. Then she rose from her seat with clenched fists, took two quick steps and flung her arms around his neck in a crushing hug. He staggered backwards a little from the impact, but found his footing enough to return it, drinking in the comfortable solidity of the girl he’d thought dead for six terrible months.

“‘m’sorry,” she mumbled into his shoulder. “I didn’t know about the plan until we did it, but... I guess it’s out enough now to tell you. Precia revived Alicia in the ritual you interrupted. She never needed Alhazred; she found another way; a better one. We teleported out just as the Garden blew up – if the TSAB thought she was dead, they’d stop chasing her and she and Alicia and Fate could just... live happily ever after.” She squeezed closer to him for a moment and then drew back. Her eyes were wet. “I wanted to tell you,” she sniffed. “I really did, I swear.”

Yuuno nodded wordlessly past the lump in his throat, and manoeuvred them back onto the edge of the trough. “It’s... it’s really good to see you,” he breathed. There were a hundred different things clamouring to be said – questions, demands, recriminations – but that one seemed the most important. “When I thought you were... do your family know?”

“They know. We couldn’t have any contact, but they knew I was alive. I saw them again a couple of weeks ago, before the... fight.” Nanoha’s expression turned peeved, and her voice rose to a shrill half-shout. “And what were you _thinking_ , shooting Alicia like that?! You terrified me! Not to mention _Fate_ , I think she’s had nightmares since.”

The young scholar half-winced, half-scowled, and retaliated in kind. “I didn’t know she’d... drop like that. But what was I supposed to do? She looked like a Jewel Seed activating, Nanoha! You more than anyone know what those things can do! Where is it; in her chest? Do I even need to tell you how dangerous that is? Testarossa is crazy if she thinks that’s a good idea! She’s turned her daughter into a Lost Logia accident waiting to happen!”

“It worked, though!” Nanoha shot back heatedly. “The TSAB were saying it was impossible, but it worked! Alicia’s alive and well and she has been for _months_ with no problems and the TSAB would just have let her die!” She took a quick breath to continue, but paused and let it go slowly, biting her lip as her anger dissipated. It was hard staying cross with Yuuno still shooting her the occasional look like he was scared she would vanish if he took his eyes off her. Even annoyed and defensive, she hadn’t realised how much she had missed her first ever magical friend.

“... really like a Jewel Seed activating?” she asked instead of flaring up again. “We saw the construct... worm thing, but we were too far out to get a good look. It... it hasn’t acted up at all in six months; not once. The output is looped into the containment; it _should_ seal itself whenever it tries to activate. She’s summoned the worm-thing again since, but she seems to have control over it, and the Seed isn’t going rampant.”

They both considered this for a while as their tempers cooled. “I think she was in control during the fight,” Yuuno offered. “Well, it was fighting independently, but she was cheering it on. And the magic wasn’t increasing exponentially like a full activation, in hindsight. I just saw the colour and the effect and...”

“Panicked, yeah,” Nanoha finished. “I understand, believe me. We were scared too.” She sighed. “I can see why you did what you did, I suppose. Fate won’t, though,” she warned. “She cares about Alicia a lot. More than herself, I think.”

Yuuno winced again. “Yes,” he said ruefully. “Yes, I got that impression. Is she... is Alicia alright? Did I hurt her badly?”

This earned him a glowing smile. “She’s fine,” Nanoha assured him. “I think she’s already forgotten about it, honestly. And Fate is okay as well – the Healer drained her. Which, uh, you should really tell the Bureau no matter what, because that means the Book’s closer to being done and it might know some of her spells now. I know Mrs Quint got drained too, is she okay?”

“She’s fine. But her arm was badly broken, she won’t be in fighting shape for a while. You know it’s the Mariage? Those grey things that were attacking the Wolkenritter. They’re an old Galean weapon that...”

Nanoha shuddered. “I know, I know. Please don’t remind me.” She stopped. “Oh,” she said, half to herself. “And I meant to do something. Um, sh-shut your eyes? Just for a second?”

Yuuno shot her a quizzical look, but complied. Blushing a little, Nanoha leaned over...

... and kissed him on the cheek. His eyes flew open, and he jerked in shock, staring at her. She became suddenly very interested in one of the wilting plants in the trough – some kind of root vegetable, she thought – and refused to meet his eyes.

“That’s for, um, protecting us from the Hound,” she said, cheeks burning. “I’d have... I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t been there. Thank you.”

Yuuno’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly a few times before he found the words to reply. “It, uh...” he stammered. “Uh, you would have done the same, I think. I know you saved the backup team on the Garden, and you didn’t even know them, really. And, I mean... you’re my friend. Of course I helped.”

She smiled at him shyly, her cheeks still dusted pink.

“Where have you been, anyway?” he asked, aware that his own face was warming up and that a change of subject might be wise. “What have you been doing? And how did you get involved in this? I’d have expected you to stay far away from Earth, given it’s only been six months.”

“I would have, except they _attacked my mother_ ,” Nanoha growled. “And I can’t tell you where I’ve been, Yuuno, you should know that.” She sighed. “I’ve been in school, though, if you must know. History is evil. And I’m not allowed to skip grades in maths anymore.” She pouted, then brightened a little. “On the other hand, I’m getting a lot of magic practice. And listen! I’ve learned your language!” She cleared her throat and demonstrated; “I can now speak in Childan! I speak it some good!”

Yuuno hid a wince and tried to think of something to say. “Your accent is certainly... unique,” he offered eventually. That was certainly true. He’d never heard anything like it. There was some Belkan in there and some of Fate’s Mid-standard, but most of the nuances were completely lost under the fact that... well, she was probably the only native speaker of Japanese in wider Dimensional Space. “Yes. Unique.”

The pout returned. “Everyone always says that,” she muttered sulkily. “When they’re being nice.”

“So you’ve been... just living with the Testarossas?” Yuuno asked. “With Precia? Attending school... probably not on any Administered World, and somewhere you could keep contact with your family...”

“Yuuno!” Her voice was sharper now. “I told you, I can’t tell you! If the Bureau finds out where we are they’ll try to grab us!”

“Then come to them first!” he argued back. “Look, nobody died in the Jewel Seed Incident! And you helped people then, and you’ve been fighting the Wolkenritter here! I’m not asking you to sell Testarossa out, but if you come back with me, Lindy will do everything she can to help you, I _promise_ , Nanoha.”

Something in the girl’s expression flickered, and her hands went to Raising Heart, toying with it uncomfortably. “Yuuno.” What had been a sharp edge was now an unmistakeable tone of warning. “Don’t... do this. Please. Can we talk about something else?”

But Yuuno was in full flow now; anger heating his words. “Like what? Precia? She’s still a dimensional criminal, Nanoha, and she probably doesn’t have long left! What are you going to do when she’s gone? Join someone else? Whoever was up on that roof with you, maybe? The TSAB is your _best choice_ ; you won’t get another chance this good! Fate and Alicia must be safe and settled now; what’s your excuse for lea- for staying away?”

Something inside Nanoha trembled, grew and settled into her limbs and chest; like hot gas expanding out of its container to fill her body with scalding indignation. “Maybe I’m still not sure if I trust them!” she snapped. “And what will you do if I don’t come with you? Tell them everything I’ve told you?” Something at the back of her mind saw the next sentence rising and wailed; trying to stop it before it came out. But the words were snapping to be released; furious and sharp-edged and cruel.

“I thought you were my-”

_‘Nanoha!’_

The panic in Nulla’s mental cry – unencrypted; open-band – cut her off before she could finish, and she thought she could feel the cord of her and Yuuno’s friendship; strained almost to the shattering point, relax. It was frayed from their short but heated argument, yes, but not broken. She’d made up worse, that was for sure, and for a second she almost sighed in relief.

Nulla’s next transmission didn’t so much remove that feeling as obliterate it.

_‘Mariage! Help!’_

...

Four ancient monsters stood guard in the third floor hospital room; implacable sentinels against anything that might threaten its occupant. Anything, that is, except a threat from within; one that they couldn’t kill or cut or even challenge. The focus of their attention slept quietly; the covers pulled up to her chin and an extra pillow slotted under her head. All four of her guardians remembered masters who had spat defiance at the universe; who had marched armies against continents and worlds, who had claimed the right to change the course of history and had sometimes done just that.

None had left so strong an impression as this fragile little girl.

“The TSAB already know we’re here,” Zafira was saying, gesturing in curt, quick motions as he made his case. “We have a Mariage cell operating in the area, we’ve blown all sense of subtlety short of revealing ourselves to the natives and letting her know by default what we’re doing; what do we have left to _lose_ , Signum? What is your worst-case scenario that won’t happen regardless if we do nothing?”

“I’m not disputing the stakes,” Signum replied. Her face was calm; almost expressionless as she paced in front of the window. “But Vita is still injured.” She waved at the Breaker; sitting on the bed next to Hayate’s feet as Shamal divided her attention between the redhead and their mistress. “She’s recovered enough for operations against dumb animals, but a hard assault on a city is something else entirely. And the only way to get her back into condition would be to use the Book itself; which compounds the problem and could have who-knows-what effect on Hayate.”

“At this point, I don’t think it’ll make things worse, actually,” Shamal put in, holding Klarwind over Hayate’s temples with a slight frown. “And I don’t mean for that to sound encouraging; I mean I don’t think the Book is capable of increasing the rate it’s draining her at this point. It can’t manage a full core rip, but given the rate it’s steadily filling lines, it’s settled at the maximum steady output she’s physically capable of in her condition.” She glanced over her shoulder. “If you use up ten or fifteen pages to repair the damage to Vita’s structure, the worst-case scenario is that it pushes it into reaching whatever critical point of hunger triggers a rampage faster. But the yield from a city might make up for whatever we take to the point that it won’t notice the loss. It takes it a while to react to complex stimuli in a dormant state – hours at least, if not a day or two.”

Silence descended as they considered. The slow, shallow breathing of Hayate was the only sound in the room.

“I say go for it,” said Vita, eventually. She stuck out her jaw stubbornly and sat straighter, ignoring the pain. Her chest and arms were still bruised almost black from the catastrophic damage she’d taken in the collision, and beneath her clothes there were cracks running through her skin like splintered glass; red light glowing dull and quiescent beneath the damaged surface. Her nature as a self-aware program was more obvious than usual, her false flesh conserving energy for vital functions.

“What choice do we have now?” she asked rhetorically. “Hayate’s dying.” As blunt as her hammer; her words drew tiny flinches from Shamal and Zafira, but their true target gave nothing away. Vite forged onwards at Signum’s stiff back. “If she dies, what’s the point? She deserves more than suffocating on some tiny little backwater without even seeing her first decade. At least this way we have a chance of saving her. A chance is better than nothing.”

She looked around fiercely, daring anyone to meet her eye. “We can’t just sit here and watch her-”

“Enough.” Signum raised a hand, turning from the window, and Vita fell silent. “I’ve thought. I’ve decided.” She gave a swift, curt nod. “We attack the city. But!” Her hand came up quickly to stall the victorious grins. “Not yet. Shamal, I’m authorising use of the Book to repair Vita’s injuries. Get her back to peak condition as quickly as possible. Zafira; you’ll stay behind to guard Hayate while we attack. Shamal will scry out the city tonight, and we’ll go in early tomorrow morning, once we have a solid understanding of what we’re hitting.”

She sat, folding her hands in her lap, her face grim. “Don’t take this lightly,” she emphasised. “We’ve taken cities before, but odds like these are unusual. We have no backup we can trust. The TSAB will be drawn to us as soon as we go loud. The Mariage may attack us as well. Our master is a vulnerability, and can’t give us fire support. Treat this seriously. Remember the honour of a Belkan.”

Two nods answered her. Shamal, though, hesitated.

“I’m... getting a message,” she said, frowning and lifting Klarwind to her temple. “The same source as last time, I think; one of those masked men.” She listened for a moment, and her frown deepened. “Signum. We may have a problem.”

“What’s wrong?” Three sets of alert senses ratcheted up to hyper-paranoid evaluation of their surroundings as Blade, Breaker and Hound shifted back to full combat readiness. Shamal shook her head impatiently. “No, not an immediate one. But I’m getting coordinates... a feed, actually. Live. There’s a ship inbound.” She paused, eyes closed and lips moving minutely as she skimmed the information she was receiving. “A specialist ship from the Bureau, sent from the next sector over to reinforce them. They’re en route to join up with the group already in the region...”

She opened her eyes again, lowering her hands. “I’ll forward you the dossier, but it seems the masked group are giving us everything we need for an ambush before they rendezvous. We’d have to move fast, but they’re still two or three hours out. More, if they hit turbulence.”

Pursing her lips, Signum rolled Laevatein’s miniature necklace form between her fingers. “How long will it take you to fix Vita up?”

Shamal considered. “An hour. Perhaps two. Like I said, we’d have to move fast.”

The tiny sword glinted in Signum’s hand. “Right. You two stay with Hayate. We’ll act on this as soon as she’s ready.” She frowned. “And see if you can’t pinpoint our helpful friends. I want to know how they located us, and what they stand to gain from their aid.”

“Are you sure?” Zafira spoke up. “It smells like a trap.”

“No,” Vita denied. “I mean, I don’t like them any more than you do, Zafira, but if they wanted us dead or hurt they’d have done it by now. They showed up at the _house_. And I think they’re spying on us somehow; there’s no other way they could show up with just what we need at just the right time so often. They’ve got something planned, but it’s more complex than just getting us caught.” She thought for a second, then smirked. “Heh. You remember about... uh... seven masters ago? Back on whatsitsname; Thesipar. They might be trying the same thing that Kabupatenic group did; seize the Book’s reservoir just as it’s completed. It’d line up with them helping us fill it.”

Her smirk slid away, leaving pensive regret behind. “‘Course, that depends on us actually filling it in time,” she added. “So we can’t afford to waste time. C’mon Shamal, fix me up so we can head out and cut these specialists off early.”

“Not here,” Shamal refused. “We’ll get behind the house wards first, so nobody picks up the power bloom. Signum, Zafira, you’ll stay with her until Vita’s ready to go?” Two nods were her answer, and she sighed. “Well then. Let’s get to work.”

An hour and a half later, two pulses washed over the screens of the BN-DV Durga, lost amidst the chaotic flux and flow of Dimensional Space turbulence. The support ship glided through a twisting, splintered kaleidoscope of energy fields. Light refracting through its shields painted a maddened picture of purple, blue and ultraviolet veils tangling around and through one another as far as the eye could see.

There was no procedure to look for boarders approaching from the Dimensional Sea. There was no point. The shields and protective fields of a Barrier Jacket would be picked up by the scanners and trigger the point defences that were standard parts of every ship in the Bureau Navy. Without a Jacket, death would come quickly to anyone who tried to navigate in such a place; devoid of oxygen, saturated with exotic radiation and maddening to look at for too long. For a human to board a ship alone, without breaching the teleport interdict or being noticed long before making contact, was simply impossible.

But for a mana construct designed and built for wars that raged across worlds, it was merely difficult.

Signum and Vita floated in a relatively calm patch ahead of the ship, rocked by tides and currents but staying mostly stationary. Vita’s skin shone slightly; wax-pale in the violet light but glowing faintly red from within as the last of the vast surge of the Book’s magic Shamal had invested in her did its work. Apart from that, though, they used no magic; keeping their eyes squeezed almost shut and their Knight’s Armour ready to deploy at a second’s notice. Heat barriers shimmered around them; passively soaking up anything that might give them away, and the subroutines that mimicked the signs of life were shut down. To all intents and purposes, from the outside, they were nothing but two inert areas of dense mana in an infinite expanse. 

_‘We’re drifting slightly out of its path,’_ Signum tight-beamed to the smaller girl; cracking her eyes open for a second to risk a quick peek. _‘We’ll need to make a dash for the hull as it passes us. Fifty seconds.’_

_‘Understood,’_ Vita beamed back. _‘I’ll lead. Deflect what you can.’_

The bulk of the ship loomed closer. They didn’t really need their eyes open to sense it – stealth was not a feature of a design the TSAB had put together from a number of light Warring States warship designs – but Vita squinted through the light show spalling off its shields anyway.

_‘Airlock,’_ she sent. _‘Follow. Now!’_

Light exploded in the void; red and purple. Graf Eisen and Laevatein appeared in a flash of steel, and the Wolkenritter shot towards the wall of the ship as it passed, their Knight’s Armour deployed and at maximum.

The ship didn’t let them approach unhindered. It responded instantly with a hail of fire before the officers within were even aware of the sudden new threat. The dumb programmes of the ship’s computer might have thought that they were torpedoes rather than the knights of the Book of Darkness, but its response remained the same. White bolts of mana tore through the intervening space in their hundreds; crashing through the shield Vita conjured and tearing great rents in her protective aura; sparking and flaring off Signum’s whirling guard.

But the Knights were already too close for it to make a difference. What should have been enough distance to drive them away or injure them had been cut down to a dash of less than a second, and more shots missed than struck home. Transit time alone meant that by the time the bolts from the furthest guns had reached her path; Vita’s speed spell had delivered her to the hull of the ship.

She drew back Graf Eisen with a dreadful smile and brought it around with a cry.

“Explosion!”

The airlock didn’t stand a chance. It buckled and broke under the assault and the Cloud Knights followed it in; ignoring the emergency field as it sealed the oxygen breach behind them. They were past the first and greatest hurdle. Now they were onboard a ship that was unprepared for an assault, in close quarters with men and women who were still uncertain or unaware of what had just happened. And there was a feast of magic for them to gather for their master.

It would be over very quickly.

...

The transition to the soot clouds and snow of Akkamar from the sun-baked mud buildings and irrigation ditches of Llevande would have been uncomfortable even for a human. To a Familiar’s senses, it was downright jarring. Arf and Vesta certainly grunted as they appeared, flinching to protect sensitive eyes and ears. But the shock of this particular transition might have had more to do with how much magic was being thrown around at their arrival point. Or the screams and panicked people filling the streets.

 _‘What on earth, Nanoha?’_ Vesta objected rhetorically to the air at large as a flash from somewhere above them preceded a ‘thoom’ that was more felt than heard. The crowd shrieked and dived for cover, forcing the pair to relocate to the middle of the street. Their appearance drew more yelling and running, but the state of chaos was already such that it didn’t really make much difference. _‘Your distress beacon said “Mariage attacking”, not “the sky is on fire”! And why aren’t you using a barrier?’_

_‘Hush and stay quiet; you’ll give us away if you shout up to her,’_ Arf snapped at her. _‘And worse; distract her. Look. Up there.’_

A pink comet pinwheeled and spun around a deep blue track, spitting flurries and flares of light at the grey figures that assailed them. There were more than two of them this time, though. And they were armed, with spears that Arf recognised with a sinking feeling as TSAB standard issue. The swarm split whenever Nanoha fired at them; flowing around her spells in eerie unison before converging again. They hadn’t caught up with their targets yet, but it was clear that numbers did not favour the mages. As Arf and Vesta watched, the Mariage managed to pin their friends into a straight flight path long enough to get off a volley of shots, which were absorbed by a green field and redirected towards the nearest Mariage units.

_‘Mousey!’_ Vesta exclaimed in surprise. _‘Okay, hold on. I’ll cloak us, and we can sneak up to help them and tightbeam a message when we’re closer...’_

Arf wasn’t listening. Her ears were pricked up, and her lips had drawn back in a snarl.

_‘... uh, Arf?’_ Vesta nudged her.

_‘Quiet,’_ the wolf hissed. _‘We’re not alone. Get that cloak up.’_

Vesta’s tail began a slow twitch as she looked around; her own lips drawing back to reveal ten-centimetre fangs. _‘It’s up,’_ she said. _‘Where? And why do we care when Nanoha’s in trouble?’_

_‘We care because that masked guy that showed up when Nanoha and Fate fought the Breaker? I think it’s him.’_ Arf nodded towards a set of smokestacks that were missing several chunks. _‘Over there. I don’t think he’s noticed us yet.’_

Visibly torn, Vesta glanced up at the sky and then back towards the smokestacks that concealed the mysterious watcher. She could see him now; a slender figure halfway up one of the towers, sheltered in the structure’s shadow, his attention turned to the sky. _‘Does that mean the Wolkenritter are here? Waiting for Mistress to get hurt enough that they can attack her?’_ Her tail lashed in agitation, enough that Arf shouldered her roughly.

_‘We don’t know,’_ she said decisively. _‘So we find out. Agreed? We can’t risk him popping out of nowhere like he did last time, and we have surprise on our side.’_

The tigress’s agitation receded. She pawed at the ground; her body swaying, her head absolutely still. _‘Right,’_ she agreed with a rumbling growl. _‘An ambush.’_

Had Arf been paying more attention, it might have occurred to her to be worried about Vesta’s tone, but she was too focused on the half-hidden figure to to notice. They snuck closer slowly, padding soft-pawed across the snow with nothing but the illusion covering them. A flight spell to get level with their prey would give them away too soon. They would have to get as close as possible before making that last dash upwards to attack.

Vesta didn’t. With twenty metres or so still to go to the base of the smokestack; her patience came to an end and she exploded upwards in a burst of motion and a cut-down Flash Move. Arf didn’t even bother yelling her name, opting instead to snap out a chain bind at their target that manacled the masked man’s wrists to the wall.

_‘Vesta...’_ Vesta sang as she appeared next to him in a flash of red light, _‘Pou-argh!’_

Twisting with impossible flexibility, the man jackknifed his body up to catch her in the stomach with both feet. He continued the motion despite the lack of leverage, folding himself almost in half to propel her further up with her own momentum; over his head and facefirst into the wall. Now crouched upside-down, he braced against her as she groaned, ripped the bricks he was chained to out of the wall and unfolded, shooting downward like an arrow.

Arf caught him halfway as Vesta’s illusion fell, twisting her head as he passed to close her jaws over his ankle. The sudden anchor jerked him to a halt, but again he bent at the waist with inhuman flexibility to make use of the force in a two-fisted hammer blow to her temple. She let go and sprang away to join Vesta, shaking her head dazedly.

_‘First sign you see of anything that looks remotely like a teleport circle,’_ she muttered to Vesta, _‘charge in and cut him in half while he’s casting.’_

_‘Right.’_

Arf licked her lips and leered at the man, baring her bloodied fangs again. _‘First blood goes to us, mister,’_ she called. _‘How about you... give... wait.’_ She licked her lips again, her tail fluffing out and her mane standing on end in shock. _‘Wait... you’re not... you don’t taste...’_ Her eyes widened. _‘You’re a familiar!’_

The masked figure cocked its head, descending slowly to the ground. Arf and Vesta followed it, splitting apart to pin it in from opposite sides, circling slowly so it could only keep one of them in sight at a time. If it worried it, it didn’t show it.

_‘Don’t think you can lie about it!’_ Arf taunted. _‘I know I’m right! Who’s your master? Why are you helping the Book of Darkness?’_

The generic mask of the EMCM Jacket tilted towards her. The figure under it seemed to sigh.

_‘I really wish you hadn’t figured that out,’_ it said in neutral tones. _‘I can’t let you go now.’_

_‘Let us go? You should be more worried about us letting you go!’_ Vesta scoffed from behind it. _‘It’s two against one, and you can’t teleport out this time!’_

_‘True,’_ the figure admitted. _‘But to be honest, that’s more of a problem for you than it is for me.’_

And then it changed, shifting form in a faint glow of light that masked its features as it shifted from skin to fur, hands to paws, mouth to muzzle. And as it grew. And grew. And grew.

Vesta’s war form was two and a half metres long, including her tail, and weighed in at almost a quarter of a tonne. Arf was a little shorter, but made up for it with a longer muzzle full of rending teeth and an extra hundred kilograms of mass.

What hit the ground in the masked man’s place out-massed both of them put together. It didn’t seem to correspond to any specific animal. There was cat in there, but there was wolf as well, and what looked a lot like bear. Arf was quite willing to believe it might include hippo or rhino as well, and maybe giant sloth. It settled its bulk on powerful hind legs as thick as her neck with the deceptive grace of something that could move uncomfortably fast for its size. Dextrous front paws held long, lethal talons that clattered on the ground, and a thick mane of coarse fur protected its neck. Its fur was a patchwork quilt of different colours that blended into one another; tan to brown to black to grey, and the knobbly texture of the skin underneath looked a lot like some sort of armour. Its ursine muzzle was wide, brutal and supported by thick bands of muscle that disappeared beneath the mane.

But what worried Arf most; far more than the chimeric war form of the beast, was the fearsome intelligence glittered in its deep-set eyes.

_‘If we survive this,’_ Arf muttered to Vesta in an undertone, _‘you never get to taunt people again.’_

Vesta was less restrained in her reaction. _‘What the heck is that?’_ she demanded shrilly from behind it. _‘You can’t make monstrous... monster-familiars! Out of monsters! That’s cheating!’_

The beast shrugged; a rolling motion setting its mane swaying. _‘Sorry, girls. No easy answers for you today.’_ Despite the neutral, anonymised tones, it seemed to speak with a trace of regret. _‘If it helps any, it’s nothing personal. But I won’t take offence if you disagree.’_

Then, before they could muster a response, it lowered its head and charged.

Arf had been right. It _was_ a lot faster than it looked. She dived aside, grateful for Vesta’s illusion covering her movement as it continued its rush towards the image she left behind. Its muzzle tracked to follow her as it got close, though, and one of those huge clawed front paws swiped sideways to catch her in the ribs. It was like getting hit by a full flurry of Nanoha’s Divine Shooters point-blank, and she could feel four stinging, burning lines of greater pain dripping blood where it had gouged her.

She ignored it. Vesta was already making her approach, leaping on it from behind and clawing her way over its back. The quarter-tonne tigress looked like a leopard taking on a bison compared to the bulk of their opponent. Lightning fast, Arf wrapped a pair of chains around its nose and jaw, wrenching its head sideways to give Vesta a good shot at its throat through the thick fur.

It bellowed with effort, bracing its front paws for leverage and pushing upwards and back against the chains. Arf was pulled closer, scrabbling at the cobbled street as it rose up onto its hind legs and shook itself to dislodge the tigress clinging to its back. Unable to throw her off, it resorted to crushing her instead; falling backwards in a practiced roll. One that would trap Vesta beneath it. She sprang away as it began to drop, but not fast enough, and Arf heard a _crack_ as its shoulder came down on her partner’s hind legs, pulling a roar of pain from deep in her throat.

_‘Photon Lancer!’_ she barked, firing half a dozen orange dart’s at the thing’s eyes. A barrier stopped them a couple of centimetres above its face, and Arf recognised the metallic shine of a reactive barrier just barely in time to avoid the wide crescent of force that gouged a long trench in the cobblestones.

_‘Powder Shot,’_ the monster grunted, and spat a deep blue ball that whistled past Arf’s head, missing her by almost a foot. She couldn’t help but turn to see what it had been aiming at.

The _crunch_ of pulverised stone hit her a second before the front façade of the house did; burying her under a pile of bricks.

_‘Arf!’_ Vesta yelled, pulling herself into the air with a broken leg. Scarlet light wreathed her claws; extending into blades longer and more formidable even than the beast’s. She ducked under its swipe, flattening her body almost to the ground in a grim parody of the boneless puddles she made relaxing in patches of sunlight, and came up at its face with a horizontal slash. The barrier sparked and broke under the scything pressure of her blades, and blood splattered across the cobbles as the beast flinched back, barely saving its eyes from a blinding. Encouraged, Vesta reared up as best she could and slashed down with both paws, putting her whole weight behind the blow.

It ducked, twisted its neck and bit forward like a striking mongoose; catching her front leg in its jaws.

_‘Ahh!’_ Vesta screamed, high and shrill as it reared up again. Muscles bulged along its neck and jaw as it lifted her by the leg clean over its head in a smooth arc, then slammed her down into the street again with bone-rattling force. A choked whimper escaped her as it reared up again, three or four metres high on its hind legs; those terrible claws outspread.

_‘Photon Lancer Impact!’_

The pile of rubble exploded. The volley of shooting spells carried bricks with it, shattering as they flew into shards that the spells carried with them. The small ones went high, peppering the beast’s head and neck, but the brunt of the blast was lower. Fist-sized chunks of brick and mortar pelted the heavyset hind legs of the creature, and Arf followed them, driving a barrier in front of her that held half a tonne of rubble into its left knee with every bit of force she could muster before ramming it with her shoulder in a direction the joint was not meant to bend.

It buckled. Awkward and unbalanced, the beast fell, slamming down on its side and rolling away hastily. It got in a powerful kick to Arf’s wounded side as it did, but it was nowhere near as strong as it should have been, and it rose back to all fours with a limp.

A second’s evaluation passed as the two sides took stock of their injuries. Things did not, the wolf-familiar had to admit, look like they were going their way.

The beast knew it too. _‘You can still-’_ it began.

What they could still, it never managed to tell them. With a crash, a burning body landed in the street hard enough to fling cobblestones up from the ground around it. It bulged, and green light shone through the clinging, burning tar for a moment before it burst with a loud ‘pop’, sending splatters of acrid chemicals in every direction. A mostly unharmed Yuuno relaxed his white-knuckled two-handed grip on a TSAB staff Device and blinked dizzily at the tableau before him.

“... ow,” he commented absently. “Uh... hello?”

...

The floating hulk of the gutted ship drifted crossways in the currents of the Dimensional Sea. The engines were offline; gutted by fire and impact damage, and with them had gone the gravity. The atmosphere was still safe, though. Backup generators had kicked in automatically to preserve the oxygen fields and slam down bulkheads around breaches in the hull. Red emergency lighting washed the gloom into dim visibility; filling every corner with shadows.

Deep within the corridors; something moved. A shock of pink hair trailing two limp bodies; it flitted along a corridor at ninety degrees to its original orientation, then kicked upwards along another until it reached a set of doors reduced to scrap metal. Behind them, the ship’s canteen was packed with unconscious floating forms hanging in the air, bouncing gently off the walls, floor, ceiling and each other in their random drifting.

Signum released her pair of victims to glide forward and collide with the group. “That’s the last of them,” she told Vita. “They were hiding in the officer’s quarters. Anyone woken up?”

“Two,” Vita said, nodding towards a tall woman with a nasty bruise growing on her jaw and a small man whose arm looked broken. “Neither for long, but we should probably hurry it up.”

Nodding, Signum pulled the glowing form of the Book-replica from its place on her hip and passed it across. “I’ll stand guard. You handle the draining.” Vita nodded, taking it, and returned Graf Eisen to its pendant form around her neck. With the Book in both hands, she concentrated, and a casting triangle wide enough to envelop the room spread beneath her feet. Reddish-black feelers rose from it; feeling their way cautiously to latch onto each floating body. Then they began to feed.

Signum ignored them, and they ignored her. The Book knew her already; she was of it and known to it. It couldn’t drain her like this even if it wanted to. Her lips made a thin line as she turned her attention outward, waiting with the tireless patience of a perfect sentinel.

A low ‘boom’ sounded from somewhere bow-ward, and the entire structure shuddered. Signum’s lips curved upwards in a small, humourless smile. She had wondered whether this might happen. And while it was bad for the plan, she couldn’t help but feel quietly pleased about the opportunity for another _proper_ fight.

“Keep draining them,” she said as another, louder explosion made the walls rattle and the floor jolt. “I’ll handle this.”

She took off through the ship, kicking off walls and deflecting off ceilings with agile grace and not a drop of magic use. There were no more ship-shaking explosions as she moved, but a gathering sense of power grew – not just from behind her, but also from her destination.

It was him. The spearman. Signum’s face was set in a stoic mask as she spread her arms to slow herself; fingers dragging silently along the smooth metal walls. But the burning heart of the knight within was coiled in anticipation. She aligned herself to the orientation of the ship; her feet a few inches above the floor, and sent herself drifting down the last few metres of corridor to the bridge.

He was standing rigid with clenched fists at one of the officer stations; reading the logs through his Device. That was all Signum took in before lunging forward; Laevatein’s tip aimed at his spine. She was intercepted before she got within five metres by a trap spell she hadn’t had time to see, and he was on her before she’d finished flying back from the concussive blast.

He did not look happy. At all. The corner of Signum’s mouth curved up just a hint as she deflected his retaliatory lunge into a row of computer banks and curled inside his guard; flicking her blade up to carve him from hip to shoulder. Against an enemy like this, there could be no attempt at gentleness. He was an S-rank with the potential to equal her even at full capacity, and he would be striking to kill. Only his regard for the ship and the greater length of his weapon handicapped him in this confined space. Signum could afford to shatter the hull and let the Dimensional Sea pour in, but for all his power he was still flesh and blood beneath his Barrier Jacket. And where his spear would be hard to manoeuvre in the corridors, Laevatein’s shorter length was at no such disadvantage.

It was a delicate balancing act over a sea of fire. Hold back in the slightest and she would die for sure. But to attack with everything she had risked killing him with a successful blow. She would simply have to trust his skill and defences to preserve his life, and her own precision to pull any blow that endangered it.

Kaisers, it had been a long time since she’d had such a challenge!

The other corner of her mouth curved up as he leapt back to avoid her sword and then lunged again; two orange javelins firing from casting triangles above his shoulders to hem her in. Laevatein shone mirror-bright for a second as she slid back and batted them aside with a spell whose origins she didn’t even remember anymore; deflecting one back at him with the flat of the blade and sending the other at the viewing window. It wasn’t literally a window in the hull, of course – the bridge was deep enough in the ship to be protected from fire; the view merely a feed from external cameras. But it _was_ the front of several crucial parts of the ship’s central computer system. And it was not rated to withstand S-rank shooting spells.

She darted to the side as he desperately cancelled the spells, reducing them to orange plumes of unbound magic. She was a little impressed he managed it with so little time, but it didn’t stop her from riposting at his spear arm while he was still blinded by the one headed at his face. He blocked her with a combination of blind instinct and luck, and hurled her back towards the door she’d entered from with brute strength alone.

They paused for a second; using the brief respite that separation gave them to think. His eyes darted towards the greasy, static sensation of Vita’s mass draining.

“She’s surrounded by your men,” she said quietly, letting herself turn in the air to present him with nothing but her head and shoulders. “Anything you fired at her would kill dozens. Were I you, I’d keep the fight well away from them.”

“Monster,” he growled. “You wear the armour of a Belkan? Where is the honour in this? What sort of knight attacks only the defenceless and then leeches from their bodies like a parasite?”

The sheer naivety of the accusation was enough to actually startle a bark of laughter out of her. His brows came together in a thunderous scowl, and he lunged at her again. This time she was prepared, though, and met him with a crash that tore through the back wall of the bridge and sent them spinning through the conference rooms and storage compartments beyond.

“You’re a romantic,” she called as he smashed the butt of his spear into a rack of shelves to clear them out of the way so he could manoeuvre. Food cans tumbled in a cloud through the air, and she sent a jet of fire at the powder that he’d filled the air with. It didn’t explode, but it forced him to retreat through an auxiliary station for the offline reactor to avoid the burning cloud. “A knight’s honour demands only one thing – to win, and bring your master glory!” She cut through a wall to follow him, parrying a thrust she expected and barely dodging around an orange-wreathed kick she didn’t. He was telegraphing more, though. Angry at his expectations being flouted.

“Where did you get your ideas of a Belkan knight from?” she called, goading him. “Bedtime stories and romanticised memories of an age long forgotten? Where is the honour in failing your master through stupidity and leniency given to an enemy without reason? Where is the honour in shaming your training by leaving an opponent alive to kill you later? Dishonour comes from _failing_ your master; betraying their will, not from-”

She lashed out with a wave of purple fire to meet a bunker-penetrating spell head-on. The leaking fuel from who knew how many lines they’d severed while gutting the ship ignited, forcing both back briefly, and Signum took the opportunity to get out of sight and start moving around to strike from his side. She didn’t bother with any more explanation.

This fool didn't deserve it. Talking to her like he knew the first thing about Belkan honour; a child of the pretender-cultures that had grown like maggots in Belka's corpse. They held up misunderstood and half-forgotten traditions like they held value in and of themselves, ignorant even of their ignorance of _why_ knights like her had once followed them. Belkan honour! Hah. The formalities and chivalries of war didn't apply to a situation like this. Only the core of the code of a knight. And she was no mere knight; she was a general. The Schattenritter and the subtle aspects of war had always been tools she used as actively as her open forces. They still were.

“... you know,” his voice sounded; muffled by the walls between them but still audible, “for someone so sure of their course of action, I’d almost say you sound defensive.”

Signum paused for almost half a second as that barb sunk home.

Then she cut through the wall and filled the room with flame.

It was a good thing that all the personnel were with Vita. Had they not been, there would have been no way that their brawl wouldn’t have resulted in deaths. As it was, the already-crippled ship was completely gutted along a third of its length and bore several new hull breaches by the time another incoming teleport pulse arrived. Multiple teleport pulses. Signum broke off her attempt to buy enough time and space to use Laevatein’s bow form in favour of a guard stance as the blue-haired Enforcer boy that had been fighting Vita over the city appeared. He floated above them, at ninety degrees to their current orientation, in the scorched remnants of what had once – ironically enough – been the ship’s maintenance section. Alone, he would have mildly concerned her.

With a group of trained combat mages and the spearman still combat-ready, she allowed herself a brief flicker of worry. But Vita’s voice reached her before the newcomers could do more than take the situation in.

_‘Signum! I’m done, and one of the masked guys is here! It’s coming your way; use its help, teleport out and worry about what it wants later!’_

She still wasn’t entirely convinced by their helpers. But the tip-off about the ship had been in good faith, and now they faced considerably less opposition than they might have done – and had made up for a good chunk of the pages lost in healing Vita already. She began a teleport, and sure enough, the masked figure appeared in front of her with barely any entry pulse to cover her escape.

There would still be pursuit, of course. But, Signum thought as her view of the gutted ship and the furious Bureau officers faded, she had expected that. And planned for it.

...

The sun had risen on a city turned war zone. Red light illuminated the black brick city of Akkamar as its inhabitants cowered in cellars or shelters. Too many of them were magical for a barrier to protect them, and there had been no time; no opportunity to raise one under the assault of a score of Dawn State killing machines. The city suffered under the lash of an alien battle.

Light flared in the sky like a firework display. Pink-tinged fire flew in plumes and showers to keep the Mariage away from its caster and her comrade. They responded in kind; moving as one, attacking from every angle and never missing a beat. What one saw; all saw. When one struck, the rest supported.

The terrifying power of the Mariage wasn’t just their endless multiplication or their fluid-form bodies. It was this: they were greater than the sum of their parts. A murderous superorganism that violated natural law; for the larger it became, the smarter it got and the quicker it responded. There was no single point of failure; no king or queen without which it would crumble. Some units were more independent than others, but anywhere Mariage gathered, a collective mind would form.

This group was not the blasphemous genius of the Dawn or Warring States. It was comprised of only twenty units or so; no more capable of the feats of predictive strategy and coordination that the Dark Kings of Galea had once commanded than it was of breaking free from the edicts that dictated its actions. But that was still twenty units. Twenty trains of thought in parallel; twenty sets of eyes, twenty Devices acting as one. They had lost several members already, but with a six to one numerical advantage, they knew they held the more advantageous position. And now their enemy’s main defence was grounded.

Like army ants sensing the movement of prey, like sharks circling a thrashing seal; they moved in.

Down on the ground, the temporarily lost main defence pulled himself to his feet and looked around a street that was starting to look like several bombs had hit it. The buildings along one side were workhouses; shoddily built to provide indoor spaces where long production lines could be set up. They were never intended to take stresses more violent than snowstorms and the shaking of the machinery, and their relative fragility was marked in rubble piles from every impact. Along the other side of the street stood the high wall of a single factory; three decidedly unstable smokestacks still towering over the city belching black clouds into the firefight high above.

“What...” he began, taking in the two injured familiars – neither of whom he had terribly pleasant memories of – and the huge beast they had been fighting. The air blurred around it, obscuring its form even as he looked, and a blue casting circle sprang into shape around its feet.

_‘Stop it!’_ Arf snapped wildly, already casting counter wards. Yuuno frowned, but shifted his grip on his staff Device and brought it down on the ground with a resonant impact. A green circle spread out beneath his feet, and then expanded rapidly out in all directions until the edge was halfway down the street.

The beast’s burgeoning teleport sputtered and vanished. The huge head swung toward him.

_‘What’s going on?’_ he tightbeamed to Arf urgently. _‘Is that the Hound? Are the other Wolkenritter here?’_

_‘Not the Hound; one of the Masked Men who’s been helping them!’_ she shot back, her words garbled by the speed of the transmission. _‘We ambushed; it’s a familiar, Vesta hurt! Help!’_

The beast moved. A thunderous flash-bang spell blinded them, and it launched itself forward, snapping at Yuuno’s Device. He shot upwards; bringing a barrier down on its head as it tried to follow him, and another plane of force from Arf kept it skidding forwards into a wall. Landing by Vesta, Yuuno slid a green disc under her and lifted her up, sliding backwards.

“Physical Heal,” he whispered, spreading his hands over her injured legs. The damage to her side was serious, but not structural. If she had been flesh and blood, it would be deep tissue bruising. Her legs, though... the back one was clearly broken, and the front was bitten to the bone. “Hopefully this will work... uh, wolf. Can you keep it off us while I help her?”

_‘Arf,’_ she responded, not looking away from the monster that was backing out of yet another pulverised housefront. _‘And I can try.’_

Yuuno nodded absently, barely registering her response. The structure of a familiar’s war form bore only a passing similarity to actual flesh and blood, and he was trying to use a medical treatment spell to fix something that was closer in some ways to a barrier jacket than bone or muscle. The only reason he was having any success at all was the fact that he'd had to patch up his own ferret shape in the past.

The beast they were fighting pulled itself free from the wall Arf had sent it into with a crash, and rounded on them. Beside him, Arf tensed. But instead of charging, the brutal muzzle swung from side to side; searching.

Vesta cracked an eye open. _‘Hi Mousey,’_ she whispered. _‘Where's Mistress?’_

_‘I have a name. Yuuno,’_ he returned. _‘She’s fighting the Mariage above us; I got knocked loose. Are you cloaking us?’_

_‘Obviously.’_ She cast a worried glance at the sky. _‘Can we... wait, what’s it doing?’_

What their opponent was doing, apparently, was using the old-fashioned approach to fighting an invisible enemy: shoot everything. A ring of light had risen from the casting circle at its feet, which was now diving and concentrating into eight balls that looked far too big to be _single_ shooting spells.

_‘Yuuno! Where are you?’_ Nanoha called from above, showing the worst timing possible as she tried to reach the ground. The other one – Yuuno still wasn’t sure who her companion was, though they were using something that looked a lot like Quint’s Wing Road – was covering her, advancing towards any Mariage unit that got close with the anti-materiel punches that had already destroyed two of them.

Glancing from the pink and blue comets streaking low over the town to the still-strong swarm of Mariage following her to the rapidly coalescing shooting spells set to destroy most of the street, Yuuno spared a fraction of a second to wish he had more time to process what was going on, and came to a decision. Ceasing the healing spell, he risked a quick tight-beam to Nanoha and prayed it was contained enough not to give away his position as he began casting again.

_‘Fine,’_ he sent, keeping it as brief as possible. _‘Familiars here. Masked Man too – another familiar! Fighting it now. Draw Mariage high, away from the city!’_

She didn’t respond verbally, but less than a second later, a plume of pink light shot out and resolved into a cloud of Axel Shooters that dipped under the lowest group of Mariage and chased them from below, detonating when they got too close. At the same time, the comet-tail in Nanoha’s wake bent through ninety degrees and intercepted the Wing Road as the young mage swivelled straight upwards, grabbed her companion and took off for the stratosphere. The swarm milled for a moment in what might have been surprise for a human, before spreading out and pursuing her.

Yuuno grimaced humourlessly and cast faster. _His_ opponent had almost finished its shooting spell, and it was looking in their direction, perhaps sensing the stacked shields Arf had erected. The glow of the shots on their side of the circle certainly looked brighter. Yuuno’s grimace turned into a bare-toothed grin as his Device finished the calculations, and he cast a few seconds before the blue spheres erupted with hundreds of arrows in a wide spray.

They met a green-backed shield so reflective that its inward surface was mirror-bright; leaning steeply towards the beast at the top, and reflected downward into the cobblestones. Chips of stone and dirt erupted as the street split apart; a wide trench dug in a perfect circle around the familiar. Much of the shrapnel hit the shield from below, and was reflected in turn – straight at the beast. Its face, turned towards them, took the brunt of the backlash from the skewed concentration of force, and it flinched backwards with a snarl. Briefly blinded, it was easy prey for the green and orange chains that wrapped around it – thicker this time, chaining paw to paw to hobble it, looping around its bulk, anchored to one another and a dozen different points on the street.

An orange flash was all it saw as Arf charged from the shelter of a doorway to its right, leaping at its eyes with claws outstretched. Wrenching its head around as much as the chains would allow, it didn’t waste time trying to break the bind around its muzzle, but used its head as a club to duck beneath her claws and slam up into her underbelly. She flew upwards at the last second, and its jaw muscles bunched as it forced its mouth open and snapped at her tail.

Within the safety of the illusion veil, a rapid, whispered conversation took place. Yuuno took a deep breath, collapsed his Device into its card form, pressed it to a furred flank and breathed out.

“Boost,” he whispered.

The wolf rushed in again, snapping and growling at the monster from in front of it; darting in and then dancing back out of range again. It struggled to free itself from its chains, but managed only to gain a limited range of motion. Unable to pursue its harasser; its jaws closed on air time and again.

“Mana Flow,” whispered Yuuno, his hands glowing as the magic poured out of him.

One of the orange chains snapped, and the beast’s front paw was free. It brought it around and swatted a cobblestone at the wolf that she barely avoided. Behind her, it went clean through a set of wooden shutters without slowing.

“We can’t hold this long,” Yuuno ground out. His Device flashed through calculations offloaded onto it, and he gritted his teeth against the strain.

The beast lunged forward as far as it could and brought a paw down on the wolf’s head with bone-crushing force.

Which hit cobblestones. It blinked at the fading orange image for a second, then swung back around to the growing aura of power a short way down the street next to one of the shattered workhouse walls. The illusion was fraying, and an orange ball hung in the air in front of three indistinct figures.

_‘I know!’_ snarled the real Arf. _‘Vesta! Five seconds!’_

A whirling blue shield sprang up in front of the snared monster; faint at first, but quickly gathering speed. Arf hissed. _‘I’ve seen it use that before!’_ she cursed. _‘It stopped a bombardment spell... Vesta! Do something!’_

“But she’s-” Yuuno began.

Vesta ignored him. Springing up from beside him, she shifted mid-motion, taking on her human form with claw-blades glowing so bright they were blinding extending from each knuckle. Crossing the distance in three bounds, she brought the attack around from the side, slicing deep into the shield. Abominably strong though it was, it was defence intended for ranged spells; bombardment beams and concentrated fire from afar. Against the overcharged melee attack, it shrieked... and burst, throwing her clear as the rotating mana currents lost containment and surged out with a concussive bang.

Arf grinned in bloodied triumph.

_‘Thunder Smasher!’_ she screamed.

And fired.

The orange beam shot forward like a train. For a second, there was a brief suggestion of a blurring to the beast’s form before the spell reached it, point blank, and carried on along an upward-angled path to knock clean through one of the smokestacks and take a chunk fully half the width of the tower out of a second. They fell with a tremendous crash into the third, and the forty-metre towers toppled with a groan to obliterate the evacuated factory hall under hundreds of tonnes of falling masonry.

Silence fell slowly, accompanied by the sound of unstable bricks that hadn’t quite got the message continuing to topple for a while. The dust tentatively settled. The light faded.

The masked man stood just clear of the blast zone. Its Jacket was singed slightly from the narrowness of his escape, but it was otherwise unharmed.

_‘...’_ said Arf, speechless with rage. The masked figure gave a nonchalant little shrug and nodded at her in a friendly sort of way.

_‘Nice try,’_ it said. _‘But like you said; I’m a familiar. I do have more than one form.’_

It looked up at the brawl above.

_‘You might be able to bring me down, if you kept this up,’_ it admitted. _‘Even after wasting all that magic. But I think your friend needs help.’_ The masked head cocked. _‘Which will it be?’_

Arf snarled. Vesta hissed, baring her teeth. But they looked upwards uncertainly.

_‘Nanoha?’_ Yuuno called. _‘Nanoha, how is it going?’_

Silence answered him.

_‘Mistress?’_ Vesta shouted.

The trio glanced back down at their opponent, at the ruins of the street around them and their injuries, then back at the sky. If pink light still shone above the clouds, they couldn’t see it.

The figure stood there. Ready. Waiting.

_‘... fine,’_ Arf snarled, speaking for all of them. _‘But next time, you won’t be so lucky!’_ With one last furious, frustrated growl, she turned tail and made for the clouds.

...

There were four Mariage left of twenty. Nanoha very fiercely refused to think anything like “so now the fight was mostly won” or “it had been getting easier”, because she had made that mistake after destroying Mariage number ten, and would barely have survived the experience had Nulla not been there. She knew better, now, than to let up the pressure just because the numbers were turning in their favour.

But the tone of the fight had changed. There was no cover and fantastic lines of sight up here; meaning nowhere to hide or retreat to – an environment that favoured Nanoha’s ranged fighting style perfectly. With each destroyed body, the Mariage group became a little less omniscient; a little less formidable. Their coordination and reactions were still as fast as ever, but bit by bit they were losing the advantage that a twenty-fold superiority in parallel processing power gave them. On the plus side, this meant that the Mariage were no longer trying to kill her and Nulla.

The down side was that they were trying to escape instead. As soon as their numbers had hit a quarter of what they’d started with, the Mariage had scattered in every direction. A teleport spell took longer to charge than a Divine Buster, but with five targets they must have been banking that Nanoha and Nulla could at most kill two of them before the rest vanished.

A newly-named Axel Barret had put paid to that idea along with the nearest Mariage, and the remainder were now diving in the only direction available in the open expanse of the upper atmosphere that wouldn’t get them hit by a bombardment spell before they could escape. Straight down towards the city.

Like a falling star, Nanoha fell after them. They were weaving and spiralling; keeping enough distance from one another that she couldn’t wipe them all out in one shot even if she were willing to risk hitting the city. But she was gaining on them. And Nulla was gaining faster. The younger girl’s Wing Road was vertical, and she was spending the mana to extend it out ahead of her. Even as Nanoha watched, it swerved suddenly in front of a Mariage; which crashed into it and slid off in an uncontrolled tumble. With its flight spell disrupted, Nulla caught up to it in seconds; crouching low as she levelled out and bringing a fist through its chest from behind. The burning spray showered down, and Nulla raced to catch it on layered tracks before it hit the city.

Three left. Nulla was already in hot pursuit of one, so Nanoha took a page from her book with the other two. She was gaining on the nearer one, and snapped a bind around its legs that brought it to a whiplash halt, then exploded. A flurry of Axel Shooters finished it off as she hastily went for the last one. It was low now – almost to the rooftops; already levelling out and preparing to hide amongst the chimneys. Nanoha’s eyes narrowed... and then widened as inspiration struck.

“Flier Fin!” she shouted, and Raising Heart pulsed as it cast the flight spell.

Not on her, though.

On the Mariage.

The drone; with its only comrade busy evading Nulla, didn’t see the spell coming. Had it been ready for it, it could have cancelled the simple pink wings as easily as a bind. But caught by surprise, it had barely a second to react as Nanoha drove it downwards with enough force to not only cancel out its deceleration, but drive it even faster. It hit a ceiling at seventy miles an hour and went through three floors before coming to a very final stop in the cellar.

“... whoops,” said Nanoha, hovering above the body-shaped hole in the roof. “Uh. I was aiming for the street. I’m so- gah! Axel Beam!” She dodged frantically to avoid the double-bladed grey knives that came spinning out of the hole like lethal sycamore seeds and retaliated with a solid beam of pink light that put another hole six inches wide through all three floors of the house. A dull ‘woomph’ and a hellish glow from the bottom announced the demise of the penultimate Mariage unit.

_‘Nulla!’_ she called, wincing at the fresh destruction but only lingering long enough to make sure that the house itself hadn’t caught light before shooting off. _‘The last one! Did you stop it?’_ She zeroed in on the location Raising Heart was guiding her to; a memorial statue of some sort in the middle of a town square. Nulla stood over a guttering chemical flame, but it wasn’t her who answered.

_‘No,’_ growled Arf. _‘I did. And guess what?’_

Her teeth bared in a grin as Nanoha landed and gasped. The Mariage had self-destructed, yes... but not all of it. A little way from the burning pool of sludge; a figure lay where it had been dragged. The left side of its torso and most of its legs were gone; trailing off into more of the horrible-smelling black goo, but the rest was intact.

“You did it!” Nanoha exclaimed. “The blocker worked!”

“Half-worked,” Nulla grumbled. “But I think there’s enough left for the Doctor. I hope. It’s not moving. Maybe it shut down from the damage?”

“Maybe...” Nanoha murmured thoughtfully. “But I don’t trust it not to... move!” She yanked the younger girl closer and slammed up a triple-layered shield as the body jerked. Orange light flared in the corner of her eye as Arf did the same, and she felt Nulla drop into a ready stance beside her.

But the Mariage wasn’t aiming at them. It twisted its abbreviated torso over onto its back and brought its remaining arm around in a blindingly quick motion; grey light building flare-bright in its palm, and slammed the budding spell into its own chest. A deafening _crack_ echoed across the square, and it slumped prone. A hole the size of a spread hand had been blown through its chest.

Silence fell.

“... dang,” Nanoha said after a while, voicing the unspoken consensus. “That... was not as planned.” She jolted and spun to face Arf and Vesta, hurriedly. “Oh! Yuuno! Is he okay, I didn’t...”

She blinked, taking in the appearances of the familiars for the first time. Vesta’s fur was bloodstained, and she was still limping and favouring her ribs. Both of them were covered in brick dust, and looked considerably the worse for wear.

“... wow,” Nulla put in. “What happened to you two?”

Arf sighed. _‘Scrya’s fine; he left to alert the TSAB to... well, what we found. It’s a long story,’_ she said wearily. _‘But suffice to say... we might have a problem. Come on; I’ll fill you in on the way back to the Doctor.’_

...

“I can see a problem with this strategy,” Heidi pointed out for the fourth time, pacing back and forth in the warehouse the Bureau forces were using as an Earthside base. “In fact, I can see several problems. For instance; if we actually find their trail, what are we supposed to do about it? Fight them? Because I can’t see that ending well. Or do we just huddle down, follow them quietly and hope they don’t notice us?”

“We send out a general alert,” Tiida reminded her tiredly, also for the fourth time. She was being a lot more pedantic about this argument than usual. He rubbed his temples and leaned back from one of the desks that they’d set up the equipment on in their chunk of floorspace; marked out by shoulder-high cubicle walls.

“Ah. Yes. Of course,” she returned. “A high-priority _very loud_ alert to let every Bureau asset in the area know we’ve found them. Because that’s a great way to not have to fight the murderous Lost Logia constructs who’ve proven capable of hacking TSAB communication channels. I should have known.”

“Heidi, stop,” Rizu cut in firmly. “Complaining won’t help, and we’re safer here than anywhere else.” Tiida shot her a grateful look, and she gave him a quick smile. “Just... cover the scanners and be use the encrypted channel if you find anything. If they knew where we were based; they’d have attacked us by now.”

“Hey, speaking of,” Mei spoke up from the comm unit. “Update came through a few minutes ago. Admiral Graham’s in the area; docked with the fleet. Bar the ship we lost to the Wolkenritter, it looks like everyone’s here who we can get on short notice. And Enforcer Harloawn says to...” Her eyes flicked over the screen, and her eyebrows drew together. “... to stay watchful. Apparently something weird’s going on.”

“Weird how?” Tiida frowned, leaning over to read the dispatch over her shoulder. She shoved him back with a scowl.

“Weird behaviour-wise. Apparently they’re acting... erratic. It doesn’t say much, but reading between the lines... I think that fight between Captain Grangeitz and the Blade had more than just fighting in it.”

Rizu cocked her head. “He talked to it? But isn’t that...”

“Really fucking stupid?” Mei growled. “Yeah. Go figure. Probably just mind games.”

“Wh-what did it say?” her sister asked, shrinking back a little from Mei’s black look. “I don’t think the Captain would have noted they were acting erratically unless he was certain it wasn’t just-”

“I don’t know what it said!” snapped Mei. “Like I said, it doesn’t say much. Just a cryptic warning.”

“Mei.” Tiida half-rose, pulling her chair back. “Cool it. She has a point.”

Her scowl persisted for a few seconds before fading. “Fine,” she muttered. “Sorry.”

“Hey,” Heidi spoke up. “Hey, hold on. I’m getting something here. Faint, but... it’s there. A teleport echo – and it’s definitely not one of ours.”

“Copy it to Mei. Mei; send the coordinates; quick!” Tiida ordered. “We can sort it out later if it’s a false positive; alert the Asura!”

“Sending now...”

A tense pause wound the air in a knot as all four of them held their breath. Seated at the comms; Mei’s expression slowly shifted from anticipation into confusion into a sick look of horror.

“It... it’s not sending,” she said numbly. “No response from the Asura. No ping. Nothing.”

She rose to her feet in a jerky motion; eyes scanning the largely-empty warehouse like a cornered animal. “They’re here.”

“You can’t just jump to the conclusion-” began Heidi, but Rizu cut her off as she rose to support her sister.

“No, she’s right,” she said softly. “There is something here. A veil of magic over the warehouse. I barely felt it go up; but it’s there.”

“Well done,” said a new voice, from right behind her.

And a green-glowing hand plunged through her chest from behind; cradling a tiny star in its palm.

“Rizu!” Mei screamed, lunging for her. Something caught her in the midsection and threw her back, colliding with one of the desks and crashing to the floor beneath a pile of equipment. Heidi brought her Device up with impressive speed, only to have it wrenched towards Tiida as she fired. She managed to curve the needles before they hit him, but a whisper of ‘Tiefer Schlaf’ was the last thing she heard as they faded.

Tiida himself managed to draw and fire three times before a hair-thin wire settled about his throat and pulled taut. The first bullet smashed into the green hand hovering over Rizu’s ribcage; scattering it and letting her drop.

Bullets two and three curved around her and struck pincer-like at the empty space behind her from which the voice had come. The thin veil of invisibility wavered and faded, and the Wolkenritter emerged. She looked to be in her early thirties, with crinkles under her eyes from smiling and a green dress and robe where he had expected armour. She looked... nice. Like someone’s mother, or maybe one of Teana’s schoolteachers.

There was nothing nice about the razor wire wrapped around his throat, though. Tiida held absolutely still, barely daring to breathe and felt something shudder through his chest like a cold wind. It didn’t hurt, which was maybe worse than if it had. Instead, it felt like a gaping hole had been opened in his ribcage, through which his lifeblood was slowly draining out. He didn’t dare look down, and not just because of what he feared he might find.

The desk Mei had fallen behind launched itself across the room at the woman, who glanced around just in time to raise a barrier for it to bounce off. Mei followed it; Barrier Jacket up and sword in hand. “It’s the Healer!” she yelled, cleaving through the green wall. “We can ta-”

Her downward stroke hit a webwork of green wire that wrenched the Device from her hand and held both stuck fast. The smart spell folded around her; wrapping layer upon layer of sticky, crisscrossing strands around her; pinning her limbs together helplessly.

The Healer smiled sadly. “There is a Belkan proverb,” she said, softly, her rings gleaming green in the twilight, trailing light behind them as she moved her fingers. “‘Show me a medicine, and I will show you a poison’. I am the medicine and the poison alike.”

Tiida stared at her, his mouth working soundlessly to try and form words that wouldn’t come. His Device slipped from nerveless fingers to clatter on the ground, and a desperate helpless pleading filled his eyes.

But though she closed her eyes in grief, she didn’t stop. “I don’t often look like this,” she admitted quietly. “Most masters don’t swing quite so far to the maternal in my image. I’m often the youngest of us.”

She motioned with a hand, and another glow around Mei signalled her draining as well. He couldn’t see Heidi, but had no doubt her mana was being sucked away into the glowing tome on the woman’s hip as well.

“You’re young, all of you,” the Healer – no, he thought blearily; the _Wraith_ – said in Mei’s direction. “Don’t throw your lives away like this.” She glanced down at Rizu, huddled limp and still at her feet, and sighed. “And don’t waste them by not taking chances, either. Sometimes one chance is all you get.”

Darkness was beginning to rise and claim Tiida. He was vaguely aware of an impact – hitting the floor, maybe? – and some more words, but they slipped away from him. At least the awful feeling of having his insides sucked out had stopped. He felt hands on his face... ah. Of course. Rizu. He’d interrupted her draining, and the Book could only drain you once. She must have just been playing dead so she could help them once the Wraith was gone.

That was good. He thought she might be sobbing, though. That wasn’t. Why...

... oh. What the Wraith had said to her. Had she meant...

... later, he decided. He’d think...

... about it...

... later...

...

“Girls!” Jail greeted them cheerfully as Nanoha, Nulla and the familiars arrived back at his base. His strange yellow eyes gleamed with joy. “Good to see you’re all unharmed. I was worried! Now, I’m sure you have things to tell me and reports to make, and Nulla, I’ll be happy to hear yours immediately, but I think Miss Takamachi might want to give hers later.” He grinned, and beckoned her closer. “There’s somebody else you might like to talk to first.”

Nanoha traded a pair of confused looks with Arf and Vesta, but obediently followed him through the underground corridors. It wasn’t until they were most of the way there that she realised where they were going.

“Did something happen?” she asked as they rounded the last corner to the medical wing. “Is someone... wait, no... Precia! Precia’s awake!”

She heard Jail chuckle as she sped forward, leaving him in the dust. Skidding through the open doorway, she flared Flier Fins at her ankles to stabilise herself and half-ran, half-flew into the quiet room Precia was set up in. Bare seconds after coming to a halt just past the threshold, she was almost bowled over by a puppy and a kitten pounding past her ankles with twin delighted cheers.

Precia – no longer chalk-pale and deathly still, though still looking horribly fragile and propped up on half a dozen pillows – looked over at her with a raised eyebrow for the still-active Flier Fins. Nestled in the armchair that had been pulled up next to her, Alicia giggled from the protective circle of Fate’s arms. The two of them were curled together on the chair along with two cushions and a blanket, and with their blonde hair unbound and falling in every direction, it was actually quite hard to tell where one ended and the other began.

“Nanoha,” Precia smiled – a little tightly, perhaps? “It’s lovely to see you.”

“It... it’s really good to see you too,” Nanoha breathed, her voice wobbling a little. After seeing the great mage curled on the bridge of Hektor’s ship coughing up blood and then deathly still under Jail’s attentions... well, Nanoha knew she wasn’t the only one who’d had nightmares about that awful first time Precia had collapsed in front of them, back during the Jewel Seed Incident. Seeing her awake and aware now, even as frail as she was; was a benediction. Fate looked like she was in heaven.

The older woman’s expression softened slightly at the sincere relief in Nanoha’s voice. Briefly. It hardened again seconds later, as Alicia’s head rose up from the huddled mass occupying the armchair and brightened.

“Nanoha!” she greeted. “You’re back! How did it go? Does Raising Heart like her Jewel Seed? Did you beat up bad guys?”

Precia’s eyes narrowed, and Nanoha winced. She hadn’t been on the end of many disapproving looks from the woman before, but even brief exposure had taught her that they were uncomfortable.

_‘We can talk later about why my daughter was allowed to install experimental Lost Logia modules on your Devices,’_ she promised over a private band. _‘And why she is in one of Jail Scaglietti’s field bases at all.’_

... oh yes. Linith... had said something about how Precia would be angry about that. And it had been Nanoha who’d made the decision to go. She’d been the only one capable of deciding where to go. Everyone else had been unconscious, panicking or Vesta.

“Nanohaaaaa!” Alicia repeated. “Nanoha Nanoha Nanoha! Tell me! I need to know so I can think of how to make it better!”

“It was fine!” Nanoha blurted hastily, not wanting to raise that subject with Precia still irritated. “Perfect, Alicia; it was as good as it could possibly get, honest. We destroyed all the Mariage exceppt one, and nearly captured it. Jail’s thingy mostly stopped it burning itself up.”

“... why did you only nearly capture it, then?” asked Fate curiously. “Did it escape?”

“Ah... not exactly,” Nanoha admitted. “It sort of... shot itself. Oh, and, um...” She glanced from Alicia to Fate to Precia and rapidly considered how well they would take a mention of Yuuno’s appearance. “... um... we... sort of broke some bits of the city,” she ad-libbed hastily, and blushed. “Uh. Again.”

Precia gave a tiny shake of her head and opened her mouth to speak again, but paused. She glanced over to the other side of the room, her lips pursed, and Nanoha followed her gaze.

“Linith!” she gasped. So focused had she been on Precia’s awakening that she hadn’t noticed the cushioned nest that the sandy-furred cat lay in. Vesta and Arf were curled up around her, purring and rumbling happily, and she was covered in a small blanket that left only her head and the tip of her tail uncovered.

She inclined her head towards Nanoha in acknowledgement, but remained looking back at Precia for a moment longer. Whatever they were discussing, it was over quickly, and Precia gave a tiny nod before relaxing back onto her mound of pillows with a sigh, as if even the effort of sitting up and speaking had exhausted her.

_‘Nanoha?’_ Linith asked. _‘There are a few things I’d like to talk to you about. Would you be a dear and carry me? No,’_ she nuzzled Vesta fondly, _‘I’m sorry, dear, this is something I’d like to talk to Nanoha about personally. She can fill you in later – why don’t you and Arf sit with Alicia and Fate until we come back?’_

After some careful reshuffling, two furry forms joined the Testarossan blanket hydra – making the armchair creak noticeably as Arf returned to her child form – and Nanoha cradled Linith gingerly. The cat-familiar sighed happily as Nanoha stroked her en route to the next room over. Once the door was shut, she let the girl deposit her on the bed and curled into a contented ball.

_‘So then,’_ she said, and shook her head at Nanoha’s trepidation. _‘No, dear, I’m not going to tell you off. I sent you here; I’ll support you if Precia snaps at you about it.’_ She sighed. _‘It might not have been a good idea in the long run, but it was the best I could think of at the time. But no. This is about something else. I want to show you something that you should know now, while we’re still here to help you understand it.’_

Nanoha blinked. A lesson? Well... she wasn’t going to complain. Still, it seemed an odd time for one.

“Okay...” she agreed. “Show me what?”

Linith nodded at Raising Heart, which Nanoha obediently offered, and laid a paw on it.

_‘I want to show you this,’_ she said. And holo-windows opened like a certain of light all around them.

Nanoha blinked for a moment, dazed by the deluge of information. Most of it was way over her head, and a lot was redacted besides – blacked out or blurred unreadable. But the pictures were enough to tell her what it was.

“... this is the reactor incident,” she murmured, reaching out and brushing her fingers over a screen that showed the reactor and its team. Precia – a younger, healthier Precia – stood at the front of the group with two other women and an older man, looking tired but proud. Behind them there were several dozen technicians and scientists, all grinning or making celebratory gestures, and behind _them_ was a huge metal bell the size of a schoolbus with cables and wires coming out of it at every angle, which Nanoha guessed was the reactor itself.

_‘Precia’s notes,’_ Linith confirmed. _‘Everything she took when she left. They’re redacted – there’s not enough to recreate it without starting from scratch – but the basic principles are here. And so is the history. Look here.’_

She swiped through the documents and dismissed most of the screens, bringing up several in particular. Nanoha glanced over the header for the first one – a preliminary TSAB report on the incident, it looked like. She shot Linith a quizzical look and began reading.

A motion of the cat’s paw, and highlights appeared here and there in the document. Nanoha skimmed forward to them. And paled.

_‘In the aftermath,’_ Linith said quietly, _‘once the dust had settled, but before she left. Certain factions in the Bureau started poking around the site. Talking about how precise the damage was. How it hadn’t damaged any of the infrastructure; only living things. About the fatality rate, and the way there was no long charge-up that could be detected in advance; no warning.’_

Nanoha’s face had turned almost as chalk-white as Precia’s had been, on the floor of the smuggler ship’s after she’d collapsed. Her hands trembled, sending shimmers through the screens closest to Raising Heart. If Linith noticed, she didn’t mention it. She just carried on talking; implacable and terribly calm.

_‘When she left, she used her authority as a project lead to wipe everything she could access. She deleted everything except her own backups; encrypted on her personal Device and airgapped away from the main memory banks. And a few months later, she found that a TSAB naval weapons development laboratory had hired some new faces.’_ She twitched a paw again, and new windows opened. Faces, job descriptions, dates. Nanoha’s eyes darted down the column, bouncing back and forth from each new picture to the team photograph and back.

Far too many faces matched.

_‘She showed this to me once,’_ Linith said, her voice cracking. _‘in... in tears. She just wanted to help make a new power source. The backers - some of them were military – they pushed her into doing it too fast, and then they started looking at how to make it into a weapon. And that’s why... Nanoha, I know you have friends in the TSAB. No,’_ she cut off Nanoha’s objection, _‘I don’t blame you for it, I’m not accusing you. Vesta and Arf assured me that the Scrya boy’s help was useful – vital, even. I know you think there are people in the Bureau who are good, who mean well, and you’re right. There are. There are, and I’m glad and I’m proud that you understand that, but Nanoha, listen to me. Look at this. Look at what happened here. Learn from what happened to Precia.’_

She placed a paw on Nanoha hand, nudging the girl to look down at meet her eyes. _‘There are good people in the Bureau, yes. But there are also people like the ones who looked at the accident that almost killed Alicia – that_ is _killing Precia – and saw a weapon. And that’s why you_ cannot _let the Jewel Seeds fall into their hands. Theirs or Jail’s. The Jewel Seeds – and Alicia herself – are too powerful and too dangerous to be trusted with men like that. For the good of everyone, you_ must _keep them safe. You understand?’_

“Then... then why don’t we just get rid of all of them?” Nanoha blurted. “Why don’t we just wait until we beat the Book of Darkness and then get rid of them for good; seal them away and put them somewhere nobody will ever find them? Why don’t we...”

She stuttered to a halt as the realisation hit her, and tears gathered in her eyes. “Alicia,” she whispered. “She needs hers just to stay alive. And...”

_‘And you need yours to protect her,’_ Linith agreed, wearily. _‘Exactly. So please, Nanoha. Promise me that no matter what happens – no matter how much you trust your friends in the Bureau – promise me that you’ll remember this. Promise me that you’ll remember that Precia trusted everyone on her team. That they only wanted to help people. That they weren’t doing anything related to weapons, or bombs, or hurting people. But there are people in the Bureau who used their work for evil anyway. Promise me you’ll remember that.’_

Tears gathered in Nanoha’s eyes. It... it hurt. Because it wasn’t just Linith that was saying this. Linith couldn’t have known about Nulla, couldn’t have known what the combat cyborg had said about her origins, about the people who’d made her... for the Bureau. But here it was again. The same pattern. The same flaws; the same corruptions in an organisation meant to help people.

Yuuno... Quint... the mages she’d saved in the Garden and the ones she’d hurt on the ships outside it... they all meant well. They were all good people.

But...

“... I promise,” Nanoha nodded, and let out a shaky breath. “I’ll remember, Linith. I promise.”

...


	10. Chapter Nine

“Firstly, I’m glad to say we didn’t lose anyone. It was touch and go for a bit, but the medics are saying everyone is going to make it.”

Lindy paused to let the cramped room release a collective sigh. Quint and most of the earthside teams were still confined to the medical wing. The faces of the less-injured of them floated around the table on viewscreens. Gil Graham sat opposite her, having teleported over from the nearby fleet to attend the meeting along with a few of his higher-ranking subordinates.

A scattering of other officers filled the chairs between them, including Zest, Chrono, Yuuno and Rizu. Lindy shot the young healer a concerned glance. Tiida’s interruption had spared her the worst of the Wolkenritter’s draining, but if anything she seemed to be taking that worse than being hospitalised. Still, she was upright, and while she was pale, she was paying attention. Lindy made a mental note to check on her progress in a few days before continuing. 

“Casualties, on the other hand, are grim. Worst off are Lanster and Ferth from our planetside detachments and Xanth, Mirrad and Leque from the Durga. The strongest mages in each group; I note. All at least A-rank. AA, on the Durga. Apparently the Wolkenritter squeezed every last drop out of them that they could without killing them - and that only barely. We didn’t see any cases of core haemorrhage, but Medical say it was a close thing.”

She looked around the ring of unhappy faces. Some much more so than others. She addressed the deepest scowl first.

“Grangeitz. Your preliminary report mentioned anomalous behaviour from the Blade?”

Pulling himself from whatever internal tirade had been occupying his attention, Zest nodded curtly. “Yes, ma’am. We have records of the Wolkenritter speaking to opponents and justifying their actions; it’s documented behaviour,” he said. “But when challenged or accused, they’ve never responded. There’s no emotional investment there that’s been recorded in the past.”

He shook his head, and began to recount the precise details of the Blade’s behaviour that had led to his conclusions. “But when I lost composure and argued back; she – it – reacted. Violently, and inefficiently. If it were a human, I’d say I struck a nerve,” he concluded.

“That struck nerve lost us the Durga,” Chrono pointed out, his tone artificially neutral and almost flirting with insubordination. Lindy was worried about him. Her son was simmering below his façade, but she couldn’t afford to lose one of her precious few AAA-rankers. “It was already damaged, but your brawl gutted it. Repairing it now would cost more than just replacing it.”

“Which is a conversation – and a lot of meetings, and,” Gil sighed, “a great deal of paperwork – for later. But right now, I’m interested in this strange behaviour. Have any of the others acted in anomalous ways?” He glanced down at a screen he brought up before him, running a hand through his grey hair. “No fatalities,” he mused. “Not just in this engagement, but overall. As far as I know, that’s unprecedented.”

Rizu half raised her hand. It was a small motion, aborted before it made it level with her shoulder, but enough to get Lindy’s attention. “Lieutenant Jhanashdi?” she asked, drawing the attention of the rest of the table.

“She, um,” Rizu said softly. The young woman steeled herself, summoning the courage to speak before all these people who significantly outranked her. “She was being kind. The Healer. No... the Wraith. They’re the same, I think. But she was careful to spare us, she was... compassionate. Regretful. Even after her draining had been... had b-been broken b-by Ti- by Lieutenant Lanster. She sh-should have disregarded me once I was no longer a t-target, but she... she apologised.”

The table considered that for a moment with murmured discussion.

“Rizu...” Mei said quietly, speaking from her bed in the infirmary. “It wasn’t your fault. It’s a good thing you didn’t get drained. Tiida will be happy about it when he wakes up.”

“Yes,” Gil agreed more firmly. “It wasn’t your fault, lieutenant.” Rizu blushed at that. “And while the Blade’s actions could be disregarded; your report confirms this as a trend. So. We have an interesting, and worrying, situation. The Wolkenritter appear to be holding back. Why?”

“Last time, the Book was destroyed by a full-scale assault,” Chrono put in, his eyes narrowing. “It’s possible they’re intentionally acting more human to try and raise sympathy and prevent us from attacking with full force.” He scowled. “It certainly doesn’t seem to have stopped them gathering Linker Cores.”

“It could also have something to do with their ally,” Zest suggested. “This man in the mask.”

“Familiar,” said Yuuno, frowning thoughtfully.

All conversation froze.

“... excuse me?” Lindy said, as he started to shift uncomfortably under the weight of a dozen stares.

“Uh. The Masked Man. Is a familiar,” he said. “I... sent you a message about it.”

Wordlessly, and without looking away, Lindy sent several quick commands to her Device. She glanced at the screen that opened; eyes flickering over the text, before turning back to him.

“Summarise.”

“Um. Okay. I ran into... uh, Nanoha, on one of the nearby worlds. The Mariage attacked; they were after a power source she had with her – I think she was trying to lure them into a trap. While we were fighting them, we got separated, and I noticed a Masked Man observing from nearby. I tried to apprehend it with her familiar and Testarossa’s, and... it turned out to be one too. But its war form was...” He shook his head. “Look, familiars aren’t meant to be like... _that_. There should be image files from my Device in the message.”

Lindy tapped the screen twice, and a window opened over the table, showing the hulking monster. More than one person gasped, though Lindy’s steady, focused stare kept anyone from interrupting her interrogation.

“What is that?” Zest asked, leaning in with his face locked in a scowl. “Some kind of... some kind of familiar made from a gene-spliced creature?”

“That kind of tech isn’t common out here,” one of Gil’s subordinates said, frowning. The woman adjusted her glasses. “Could it be an alt-form of the Hound? We have observed destabilisation of their forms under certain-”

“And why you didn’t see fit to inform anyone of this?”

Yuuno flushed. “I sent you the message!” he protested. “I marked it urgent! Immediate priority! And you were in meetings with important people!”

Lindy had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. “It was buried under everything else I’ve been dealing with,” she admitted, even as several of the military observers at the table began a discussion of possible rogue scientists who could be behind the peculiar familiar. “But really, you should have made sure I knew about something this important in person.”

“I just-” Yuuno began. She sighed and held up a hand.

“Though... I suppose you’re not used to military reports. Well, at least we know now. Though I don’t think you explained why you were there to run into Miss Takamachi in the first place?” Delicate inquiry hovered fairy-like around her words, backed up by pointed disapproval.

“I... uh,” he mumbled. “I was...” The rest of his sentence tapered off into incoherency. Lindy raised an eyebrow at him.

“I was looking for her,” he repeated, sighing. “Look, I know the ship we caught on our sensors beat a quick retreat, but I know Nanoha. This is her home, her family. There’s no way they’d be able to get her to leave, especially with Testarossa weak from a draining. So I assumed she was still around. Without the ship, that meant she needed somewhere to stay, and Nanoha goes stir-crazy if she can’t practice magic. I guessed that she’d go somewhere with a high mage population to hide her signature, looked up the biggest population centres in the area, and... uh... started looking into them during my free time.”

“... Yuuno...” Quint began, looking pained.

But Chrono got there first. “You realise she’s made her choice, Scrya?” Yuuno shot him a glare, but there was surprisingly little acrimony on the other boy’s face. If anything, he looked concerned. “She had a chance – she’s had multiple chances – to side with the Bureau. If you keep chasing her when she doesn’t want to come back...”

“I don’t care!” Yuuno snapped. “I don’t care. I’m still not giving up on her. I can’t. I won’t. Because... because she hasn’t given up on me. She talked back. She reached out. She asked for help. And I refuse to betray that.”

Gil cleared his throat. “I understand that you may have some other things to discuss,” he said, “However, I think we really need to focus on the matter at hand. A familiar, you say? Hmm. The Hound, perhaps? I agree with you, Lessner,” he said to the woman who had raised the possibility. earlier. “That would fit with it aiding the Wolkenritter, and... well.” He motioned at the image of the monstrous beast. “It certainly looks the part.”

“The Hound was at the confrontation in the city, though,” Yuuno pointed out. “And I’m sure this familiar was operating elsewhere during that- Chrono?”

Chrono was gripping Yuuno’s wrist like a vice, sitting bolt upright. “Operating elsewhere... Scrya,” he snapped, “the timestamps. When _exactly_ did you see the familiar, and where?”

“... um, Akkamar. On UA-104.The logs are on my...”

Snatching the Device, Chrono pulled up a screen, leaving Yuuno to finish “... Device” in a disgruntled tone. It only took a few seconds before the Enforcer made a noise of triumph.

“I _thought_ so!” he declared. “Look at these. The Masked Man who interfered on the Durga _couldn’t_ have been the one Scrya fought. The turbulence in the Sea at the moment...” Pulling out S2U, he sped through a series of rapid calculations. “Even assuming a specialty in rapid teleportation, they’d have to go around the major turbulence spots – not to mention avoiding our fleet by a wide margin, or we’d have picked them up; and we were close to between them on the Redward axis. It would have taken five or six minutes at least; maybe as many as ten or twelve. And they were there...”

“Not quite at the same time...” Yuuno agreed, comparing the timestamps. “... but close. About a minute and a half between confirmed sightings at each point. You’re right. There are two of them. At least.” He pursed his lips. “The Mariage are using EMCM as well. And there was a masked mage with Nanoha who... who was using Wing Road.”

Quint went white. “What?”

“I didn’t get a look at their face, but they were small – shorter than Nanoha, I think, though the disguise Jacket made it hard to tell. And they were using something very like your fighting style.”

“The girls-” Quint began, even as Lindy and two of the naval officers tried to speak up. The four-way conversation degenerated into incoherent noise for a moment, until Gil raised his voice.

“Quiet!” The room went silent. “Scrya,” the admiral said with impressive calm. “Is that everything relevant you can remember from your encounter?”

Yuuno considered. “Testarossa survived,” he offered. “Nanoha told me. And they didn’t go to Alhazred. They teleported out of the Garden just before it exploded – hid the trail in the chaos. Um... that’s it, I think.”

Several sighs of relief went around the table at this, and Gil nodded. “So. Let’s try and make some sense of the situation. We have ourselves, the Mariage and Testarossa’s group. All of these seem to be acting predictably. We have the Wolkenritter, who are holding back for some reason. We have... apparently at least two familiars...”

He paused, humming thoughtfully. “No, we don’t, do we? We have at least two _anonymous individuals_ , one of whom we know to be a familiar, who have been helping the Wolkenritter. We have another masked individual with Takamachi who is opposed to at least the Mariage and seems to know Wing Road.” He rubbed his face tiredly. “The familiar could be the Hound, I suppose. Or... hmm. Jhanashdi, you’re sure the Wraith is in fact the Healer?”

Rizu looked up from her lap. “She didn’t actually say so...” she said. “But... yes. I’m sure.”

“Nanoha’s friend is one of the girls; I’m sure of it,” Quint put in. Her lips were a thin line. “From the Combat Cyborg incident. The older one would be around her age, and the way they disappeared...”

“I agree,” Gil said. “Which is why I think we have another player here; one we haven’t been aware of. I suspect...” He sighed, folding his hands in front of him and leaning heavily on the table. “I suspect the master of the Book may have a backer. Someone with mages and resources in wider Dimensional Space. There’s no proof, but the pieces line up.”

He began to count points off on his fingers. “The Wolkenritter showing up here; at the site of the Jewel Seed Incident not half a year on, with these masked figures helping them. The attacks in Bellemay – anonymised Jackets, and at just the right place and time to keep our forces tied up and away from here. And now Takamachi – a girl who’s already been taken in by one experienced, cunning manipulator – appearing with a combat cyborg who vanished under mysterious circumstances.”

He shook his head. “It’s not a pretty picture. The question is what they’re after, and how much of what’s happened has been according to their plan. I doubt they’re playing the Mariage and the Wolkenritter against each other – schemes like that sound good in theory, but rarely work in practice. And if they wanted to lure Takamachi back to get their hands on the Jewel Seeds, they’d already have them... hmm. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they’re only just now reaching out to her, if she and the Testarossas have parted ways.”

Yuuno shook his head. “Arf was with her. She’s still with Fate, at least. Chrono, what do you think? Chrono?”

“Hmm?” Chrono was staring at Admiral Graham, his eyes not really seeing what was in front of him. He shook himself slightly. “I think... honestly, I think we don’t have enough information. We need more data. Admirals, do I have permission to do some digging into possible backers?”

“Granted,” Lindy said, clipped and professional. “Yuuno, please assist him. Meanwhile, the rest of us need to start planning. Things are going to come to a head soon. I can feel it. When they do, we need to be ready.”

...

“Are you ready? One, two, three, go!”

Nanoha hovered anxiously as Fate snapped Bardiche up, her feet automatically shifting to lower her centre of gravity as her Device set up in assault form. The boxy housing of the Jewel Seed stayed unlit as a sphere of electric gold began to form at the business end of her Device. It grew, condensed and brightened as firing rings spread out in front of her; two thin at each end of the barrel, one wide around the ball itself. From the size of her head, it grew first to the size of a beachball and then wider than Nanoha’s outstretched arms.

[Thunder Smasher,] intoned Bardiche.

“Abort,” Fate said, the syllables tripping over the end of her Device’s. The rings vanished, and the gathered magic slowly began to fade; draining back into her Linker Core. Nanoha waited until it was gone before shuffling closer.

“So?” she asked nervously. Fate pursed her lips and held her hand out, quick-casting a set of Plasma Lancers without firing them. Like Nanoha, she’d taken the upgrades to her Device and her enforced downtime during recovery as an opportunity to refine her spell library. She held the shooting spells for a moment, before dispersing them with a wave and a nod.

“I can fully charge a bombardment spell, and my speed is back up to par on shooting spells,” she said thoughtfully. “Some mana loss, but no more than normal. Definitely no haemorrhaging.” She offered Nanoha a tiny smile. “I think I’m fixed.”

“Wonderful!” Nanoha dived for her, hugging her around the neck and sending them both back down onto Fate’s bed. “Oh, I’m _so_ glad you’re better, I was really worried! Are you up for some sparring later? Just to make sure we haven’t got out of shape. Tre can come along too; I bet you’ll like her!”

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with Tre?” Fate asked, levering them both into a sitting position but letting Nanoha maintain her hug.

“Uh huh! She’s really good!” Nanoha said, swinging her legs around to dangle over the side of the bed and kicking them idly. “She’s almost as fast as you and she’s a cyborg! And she likes Vesta!”

“Oh,” said Fate, her expression tightening.

“We did an orbital drop together! It was amazing! I can’t wait to do it again!”

“Oh.”

“Fate! You’re all better!” Alicia tore into the room in a swirl of skirts and hair with Arf at her heels, cannoning into her sister and throwing both arms around her midriff. For her part, Fate let out a faint ‘oof’, but barely swayed. She returned the hug automatically as she checked Alicia over, her tight expression turning into a frown as she found smeared dirt and several scratches on her face and arms.

“What have you been doing?” she demanded, fingering a thin scrape along Alicia’s cheek. “Have you been fighting?” She glanced at Arf, who shook her head minutely.

 _‘No fights,’_ she sent on a quiet narrowband to Fate and Nanoha. _‘Almost suspiciously peaceful, actually. From what Linith said about this guy I was expecting worse, but they all seem totally friendly. Well, Uno’s been watching us, but I think she’s just annoyed about the mess. There... there has been a lot of mess.’_

Alicia was more emphatic in her headshake. “Nuh uh! I’ve been playing with Sein!” There was a slightly brittle edge to her grin. “We’ve been doing hide and seek and taming her lemur! Uno said she wasn’t allowed it, but she really _really_ needed a pet so I told Uno she could have Wormy as a pet if she couldn’t have her lemur and she agreed to the lemur and went away!”

 _‘She didn’t look happy,’_ Arf put in. _‘Don’t think we’ve made a friend there.’_ Alicia flapped a dismissive hand at her, unconcerned.

“... uh,” said Fate. “The... lemur scratched you, then? Is that safe? Couldn’t it get infected?”

“S’okay!” a new voice chirped happily from above them. Four pairs of eyes – two startled, one impatient and one exasperated – turned upwards to the cyan-haired head that was... poking through the ceiling? Nanoha and Fate blinked in shock. There was no hole, no crack or opening in the plaster. The girl – younger than Alicia; perhaps Quattro’s age – simply protruded through it like a hologram.

“We wen’ta Uno to get looked at!” the new arrival announced, dropping a little so that her upper body hung through the ceiling. Nanoha was reminded of hanging upside-down from the monkey bars in the playground by her legs. “Only I din’t have to! _I_ din’t get scratched! ‘Licia did!”

“You should’ve warned me he’d scratch!” Alicia accused. “He almost got away!”

 _‘He_ did _get away,’_ Arf grumbled. _‘I had to catch him again.’_

The younger girl hung her head – well, raised her head – in shame.

“Sorry,” she said mournfully. This seemed to be sufficient appeasement, as Alicia nodded approvingly and turned back to her sister.

“This is Sein!” she told Fate. “She can go through things! And calls me ‘Licia.”

“... I got that, yes,” Fate said distantly. “... how?”

Alicia paused, considering it as she shifted Fate backward into a chair and sat down in her lap . “Not sure,” she admitted. “But not the way Nanoha goes through things. She doesn’t make the wall explode first.”

“Hey!”

“I’m glad you’re better, though,” she continued over Nanoha’s objections, slinging her arms around Fate’s neck again. “I was worried about you. You’re not... you’re not allowed to get hurt like that again, okay?”

Fate’s mouth opened wordlessly, and she ducked her head a little as her cheeks flushed. “It’s okay, Alicia,” she said quietly. “I’m okay. Really. I’m sorry for worrying you.”

Alicia nodded, pouting. “Just don’t do it again,” she ordered. “And... can we see mama? Is Doctor Jail done with his doctoring?”

Fate traded a glance with Nanoha, who shrugged.

“He probably is,” she offered. “And Vesta was keeping an eye on her. We might as well go and see.”

...

Jail looked exhausted, and the manic air of energy that normally buoyed up his shoulders was missing. His purple bangs hung limply around his face. From the look of the bags under his eyes, he’d pulled at least one all-nighter, if not more.

“I’ve done all I can,” he said, sitting down heavily in a chair. “Which isn’t as much as I’d like, but Precia is too fragile for any of the riskier procedures I could try. I’ve done my best to stabilise her and stop her spiralling downwards. If it takes, she should wake up stronger and we can see about some proper treatment, but...”

He shrugged, and reached for a mug. His hands trembled faintly as he clutched the peppery-smelling drink. “It’s up to her now. The treatment took a lot out of her, so she’ll slip back under soon. Whether or not she wakes up again depends on how hard she’s willing to fight.”

“Can we see her?” asked Fate. Alicia, clinging tightly to her arm, squeezed her fingers and looked up imploringly. Jail nodded, gesturing at the door in mid-yawn.

“Don’t overstrain her,” he cautioned. “But yes.” He eyed Alicia. “If you have anything you dearly want to tell her, now would be a good time,” he added. The attempt at delicacy didn’t stop the little girl’s face from crumpling.

“Fate?” she asked, her voice wobbling. “She will wake up again, right? Right?” It was half-plea, half-demand.

Fate didn’t answer, and Nanoha stepped in hurriedly before Alicia glanced up and caught the look on her sister’s face. “Of course she will,” she said firmly. “Precia was willing to fight the whole TSAB for you! She’s not going to give up now that she has a chance to get better, is she?”

Alicia didn’t look entirely reassured, but she wasn’t caught in achingly vulnerable terror anymore either. Nanoha counted it as a win and followed the pair into Precia’s room.

The number of machines around Precia’s bed had doubled. One of them seemed to be piping her blood out of her, into a big boxy machine and then back in again, while another held a curved metal plate a few centimetres over her chest on an adjustable arm. Linith was curled up on her ankles with a blanket and a Vesta wrapped around her. The latter was the first to notice their entrance.

 _‘Hi mistress,’_ she said, more subdued than usual. _‘Medicine is icky. And boring. And smells bad.’_

Linith was apparently awake, as she huffed a soft laugh at this. Precia’s lips twitched, and she opened her eyes.

“Alicia,” she greeted her daughter softly. Her voice was a breathy whisper, and her breathing never changed in rate. The glowing sigil on her chest was what drove that constant inhalation and exhalation now, not her lungs. “Nanoha. Fate, Arf. It’s good to see you.”

“Mama!” Alicia detached herself from Fate’s arm and rushed over, making a sound of protest when Fate lunged forward and caught her before she could fling herself at Precia. Nanoha moved around to the other side of the bed so as not to get in their way. “Doctor Jail said you were going to sleep again! Please don’t! Please please please! You have to stay awake!”

Precia blinked slowly, tiredly. She shared a look with Fate over Alicia’s head, then smiled at her.

“Don’t worry, dearest,” she soothed. “I’m just tired, so I need to rest. To heal.”

“Then promise you’ll wake up again!” Alicia demanded. “The Doctor said you might not, so you have to promise you will!”

Precia closed her eyes again, stress lines crinkling around their corners, and Nanoha stepped in again. “Alicia, Jail said not to strain her,” she said quietly. “Keep your voice down and don’t demand things like that, okay?”

“But...”

“Come here, Alicia.”

Fate looked worried, but a glance from Precia had her letting Alicia go. Carefully, the little girl shuffled over to the bed and leaned down to let her mother kiss her on the forehead.

“My Alicia,” Precia murmured, and the warmth and overwhelming fondness in her voice brought tears to Nanoha’s eyes. “My daughter. I’ll always be with you, darling, whether I’m awake or asleep. Whenever you practice with your Device-engineering, or braid flower crowns, or play with magic...” She smiled wryly. “Or tease your sister, or cause mischief with Arf and Vesta. I spent so long without you, and when I got you back you were everything I’d ever wanted. I’ll always love you, Alicia. Always.”

Alicia was crying as well; silent tears sliding down her cheeks as her lips wobbled. “I love you too, mama,” she said, her voice quavering as she bent her head into the crook of Precia’s shoulder, still staying so careful to avoid putting any weight on her as though the woman was made of glass. “I... I... you can’t go. You _can’t_. You... you... you have to stay awake! You have to!” She almost lunged forwards in a desperate hug, but Fate’s hand on her shoulder held her back.

Precia kissed her again. “Be good for your sister and Nanoha while I’m asleep,” she cautioned. “Don’t cause too much trouble for them.” Alicia nodded, with a choked sob.

“Fate.” Precia’s voice firmed a little – determined, perhaps, to finish all her goodbyes before falling into a coma again. “Fate, dear. Everything I have asked of you, you have done. From your actions, Alicia is safe. I can never thank you enough for that. For... for putting up with my expectations of you, and for exceeding them. I have one more thing that I want... that I _need_ you to do-”

“You don’t have to,” Fate assured her. “I’ll keep her safe. I promise. I’ll look after her, always.”

“I believe you. You’re a good girl, Fate,” Precia smiled, and paused to do nothing but breathe for a frighteningly long moment, her eyes sinking shut. Before the girls could panic, though, she continued. “I’m proud of you, Fate. Never forget that. I know that I can count on you in my absence. Arf and Vesta, you too. You do your mistresses proud. I know I can leave them safe in your care.”

“And Nanoha.” She chuckled softly, although it sounded more like panting. “My young protégé.” She paused for too long. “I wish I had met someone like you years ago. You are a brave, talented and compassionate young woman. I have no doubts that you will exceed me, in time.” She managed a weak, wry smile. “Even if I might not see you do it. I believe you can. Don’t let me down. Do you promise?”

Tears streaming down her cheeks, utterly beyond words, Nanoha could only nod in silent agreement. Precia’s eyes gentled.

“I owe you a debt greater than I can possibly repay, my dear,” she said softly. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart. For what you have done for me and my family. Thank you.”

As Nanoha let out a choked sob, Precia turned, with an effort, to the girls on the other side of her bed. “Alicia. Fate. Sisters.” A wistful smile. “Take care of each other. And forgive me my failings. I... have not been as good a mother to you as I should have been.” She raised a thin hand at their protests. “Either of you. If I could turn back the clock...” The machinery bleeped. “I wish I could. But... but I don’t think even I can manage that miracle.”

The words won a weak giggle from the girls.

Her hand fell limply back down to the bedsheet, and she breathed slowly for a few seconds. “I am... proud of you, my daughters. Both of you. These few months haven’t been long enough.” She trailed off. “But years wouldn’t have been enough either. Stay strong when I am gone. I’ll always be with you. Be there for each other.” She laid her head back down on the pillows, closing her eyes in exhaustion. “I am proud of you,” she repeated, slurring a little as she began to drift away again. “Proud of you all...”

She trailed off, her breathing mechanically constant. Lying there on the bed, she looked old and tired and frail. It was like she was a fragile thing of folded paper, like if someone opened the door to the hospital bedroom she might blow away.

“Mama?” Alicia asked after a moment; real fear seeping into her voice. “Mama? Fate, she... no, she was... she was saying goodbye! Mama! Wake up, you-”

_‘Girls.’_

Linith’s quiet tone cut through her developing panic, or at least rerouted it to a different target. Arf bared her teeth, her eyes wide.

 _‘No goodbyes!’_ she ordered desperately, as if enough conviction could stop Linith slipping away even if Precia gave up. Vesta curled tighter around the older cat in tense, mute agreement.

Linith sighed. _‘Don’t give up hope,’_ she counselled. _‘Precia is just planning for the worst, that’s all. She wants to wake up again, and she still might. Besides,’_ she added, and Nanoha thought she heard a hint of sad amusement in her words. _‘Even she doesn’t know everything.’_

 _‘Just remember this, girls. No matter where you go, no matter what you do. We will always love you. We will always be proud of you. And there is nothing that can stop you as long as you stay together.’_ She nuzzled Vesta affectionately, and purred as Fate leaned over to stroke her. _‘Every good parent hopes to be surpassed by their children. I’m one of the lucky few who’s been able to see it happen.’_

She sighed, settling her head down again. _‘Just... make sure you remember who you are. Above everything else, try to be happy. Don’t... don’t spend so long being sad... as Precia did. She was sad for too long. Promise me you won’t do that. Remember the good times, not... not the bad times. She wouldn’t want you to be sad like her.’_

Fate squared her jaw, and took a shuddery breath. “I promise,” she said, speaking for all of them.

Linith yawned. _‘I think I need to rest now, dears. Not for as long as Precia. But for a little while.’_

Fate nodded gravely. “We’ll give you some quiet,” she promised. “And visit you tomorrow.” It was difficult to drag Alicia away from the bed, but between them the girls managed it.

“It’s okay,” Nanoha assured her as they left. Already her mind was whirring. “You heard Linith. She’s planning for the worst, just like she did with the Jewel Seeds, and that... that worked out basically okay for everyone, nearly.” 

Alicia gave her a worried look. “It... it did. Yes,” the little girl said weakly.

Nanoha’s smile slipped for second as an unpleasant corner of her brain pointed out that she herself hadn’t come out of it terribly well off, but she shook it off with a determined smile. “Dr Jail is a genius, remember? And he said it’s up to her, and she’ll fight for you, Alicia. Like my papa did when he was badly hurt. I was even littler than you, and I... I thought for sure he was going to d- to go away. He was in hospital for months and months and months. But he didn’t. He got better and he came back, and we didn’t need to use any of those sad plans we’d made for the worst.”

She took Alicia’s left hand with her right, and Fate’s right with the other, and squeezed both firmly. “She’ll get better,” she declared, her voice unquestionable. “That’s a promise.”

...

When you were hurt, it took a while before you were better again. Annoying as that fact was, it was hard to argue with. But that didn’t mean Mei had to like it. Enforced bed-rest always sucked, even in a fairly nice recovery room like this one, and even Rizu’s best efforts had never kept her away from strenuous activity for as long as the doctors recommended in the past.

This was the first time it had happened since she’d been diagnosed, though, and she was finding – with some surprise – that it was actually easier to stay put now. She was still restless, of course, but there was none of that furious itchy _need_ to be out and doing something that had always plagued her before the meds. One of those unexpected little bonuses that kept cropping up, she supposed.

Sadly, free emotional maturity and a calm acceptance of consequences was _not_ part and parcel of the treatment package, which was why Rizu had had to blackmail her into telling their mother she’d been injured. Again.

Not that she was going to admit that, of course.

“I know you get worried when I, uh, forget to mention stuff like this,” she said to the recorder, sitting with her back against the headboard. There was no real reason for her to be here – she was dressed normally and on top of the covers – but Rizu had a fair case of survivor’s guilt already and Mei ‘risking her health’ before Tiida had woken up might actually send her into tears. Which would suck on many levels. Mei hated it when Rizu cried.

“I’m trying to be better about that, so I’m letting you know even though I’m fine,” she went on. “Really fine; nothing permanent and I should be back on my feet in a few weeks, I swear. I, uh, can’t tell you what happened, but... basically I was in over my head and just charged when I should have run.” She sighed. “Like Da- like an idiot. I mean... you don’t need to worry about it happening again, I’m better about that now and I wouldn’t usually have done it. It was just a kind of stressful situation. Uh, more stressful, I mean. _One-off_ stressful. Like, not the sort of stress I’m gonna have in normal missions. Or ever again, probably. So there’s no need to worry, honest. Wait, no, I said that already. Urgh.”

She hung her head. “Okay, so this is probably sounding really bad. Just... yeah, I promise – you can ask Rizu too – it’s not something that’ll ever come up again. Special circumstances made me lose my head, and... I mean, we’re not that far off the anniversary of Dad, so... yeah.” She made a face. “I shouldn’t have let it affect me so much. Stupid of me.”

“I don’t know about that,” came a voice from the door. She jumped and looked up to find Chrono standing there. He wasn’t exactly leaning against the doorframe, but there was an absence of the stiff parade rest he normally stood in that made her think he was as relaxed as he was able to get given the current crisis. Her eyes crinkled as she tried to resist the urge to make jokes about the stick in his ass and what might have happened to it.

“It was foolish, yes,” he continued. “But Admiral Lindy had to order me to keep my emotions out of the case as well. Twice. And I’m pretty sure I have a reputation for being a... what was it? Stuck-up navy brat?”

Blushing and stammering in embarrassing situations was not in Mei’s nature. Her ears heated a little, but that was it. “Yuuno called it ‘obnoxious’, actually... well, I mean, he sort of also had to tell me that meant ‘annoying’. Uh... in... sort of a good way?” She shook her head. “S’not natural, someone who’s just nine talking like that. I bet his family locked him in a cellar full of books with really long words in them and used to beat him if he talked normal.”

He raised an eyebrow, but she was pretty sure the straight line of his mouth was hiding a smirk. “Fair enough. Don’t send that message until you’ve run it past a censor, by the way. It would be pretty easy for someone familiar with your background to guess what you ran into. Now, do you know which room Nakajima is in? I need her help with something.”

“Hah. Haha. No.” Mei shuddered, and gestured around at the room she was stuck in; one of the smaller temporary beds near the entrance to the medical wing. “There’s a reason I’m in here instead of the main ward where they can keep an eye on all of the patients at once. She kicked out of that meeting not long after you did, and whatever the story with that Wing Road dude Yuuno mentioned is; she is _really_ not happy about it. Like... if you want to live, Chrono, do not go in there. She will murder you just from sheer force of angry. I thought for a minute I’d forgotten who was the crazy one with berserker great great great whatever grandparents.”

Okay, she was exaggerating a little there. But she’d still prefer to be fighting the blonde Testarossa kid with the scythe again than sitting in a room with Quint looking that quietly, terrifyingly furious. The other woman had looked about one wrong word away from forgetting that she was done up in casts and breaking everything and everyone in the room.

Chrono frowned, and seemed to consider her seriously for a moment. “Hmm. Well maybe you can help me instead. I need you to do some research into possible backing the master might have in wider D-Space.”

Mei cocked her head. “Uh, isn’t that what _you’re_ supposed to be doing?”

“Yes. But I’m not going to be doing it, so I need someone to feed Lindy some drafted notes from me if she asks for an update. Scrya is looking into things as well, so you don’t need to worry about missing vital information. Just make sure it looks like I’m working on it.”

“You... like, have read my reports? Like, ever?” she pointed out. “The good bits? They’re the bits I manage to fob off on my sis.”

“Yes. I had guessed. But I don’t have a choice.”

A slow smile was spreading across Mei’s face. “You... you’re asking me to _cover_ for you,” she said incredulously; half-question and half-statement. “I don’t... I’m not sure I believe this. You, what? Asked to go research this stuff so she’d let you off the ship, only you’re going to do something else instead?”

Her smile slid a little as he nodded; dead serious. “I think I have a lead. I need to investigate it, but I can’t let the admiral...” 

“You mean your mother? Or the other one?”

“... either admiral know about it. So I need someone to cover for me.” He paused. “And send me an emergency call once I’ve left, too. I can set a general filter to block it, then turn it off and receive the ‘come back’ message if I need an excuse to leave in a hurry. No,” he added sharply as her eyes started to narrow. “Don’t try and guess. It’s better if you don’t know.”

He paused, shifting uncomfortably. “We don’t know each other that well, so... I’ll understand if you don’t feel comfortable helping me with this. I’d ask that you don’t inform Lindy of-”

“Nah,” she cut him off. “It’s whatever you worked out during the meeting, isn’t it?” She shrugged at his surprised expression. “I saw _something_ hit you. That expression people get when they suddenly realise something obvious.” She grinned. “I’m waiting for it on Tiida when he works out Rizu likes him. Not sure anyone else noticed, but I was looking your way when it happened. You’re sure about whatever it is? That you’ve got a good lead on the case?”

Chrono opened his mouth to answer automatically, paused, and seemed to consider it. After a moment’s thought, he gave a sharp nod. “At the absolute least, it’s something that needs checking out. Quietly.”

“Then I’ll trust you on it. And won’t snitch on you to your mum.” He looked at her disbelievingly, and she grinned. “Hey, like you said. You have a reputation. You wouldn’t do something like this just to slack off. Though... I guess you don’t have such a big stick up your ass after all, do you?” Ooops. The stick joke slipped out.

At least it bought a smirk from him.

“That’s classified information,” he cautioned. “Don’t tell anyone.” With a wink, he turned and left. A moment later, his head dipped round the door again. “Oh,” he added. “And you should probably turn that recorder off. And wipe it of the last few minutes.”

“Huh?” She glanced at the holowindow she’d been speaking into, where... yeah, the recording light was still on. “Dammit, why didn’t you say so sooner? Harlaown!”

He was gone.

“Rasser’ sassin’ stupid asshole,” she mumbled to herself. Man, why were the cute ones always such jerks?

...

Minutes ticked by in the quiet room, the hum of the machinery forming a hushed choir anchoring their patient to the land of the living.

Slowly, and with great effort, Linith opened her eyes again. She waited for a moment with her ears alert, perfectly still, making sure there was nobody nearby.

Then she slid off the bed and transformed. The change to her human form came slower than usual, as if she was pulling it to her from a great and terrible distance. Even after she completed it, she had to kneel for a few seconds on the floor, catching her breath. Her hands were glitching, the mana unable to perfectly hold a coherent form. It was fuzzy around the edges.

Gritting her teeth, she pulled herself together, pushed herself to her feet and moved over to the bed. She sat down heavily on the edge, breathing deeply. For a second or two, she looked down tenderly at Precia’s face, drinking it in. Then she gently took the Device from the once-great mage’s hands, and made a complicated motion over it. A pale tan light sank into it.

One by one, gleaming with their own inner light, the thirteen Jewel Seeds stored within emerged from storage. They formed a ring above the sceptre, spinning in a slow and graceful orbit. Despite the seals containing their power, their mere presence seemed to charge the air and crackle through the atmosphere of the room. Ominous they were, but safe.

For now.

She sighed wearily. “I’m sorry, girls,” she whispered, breathing slowly and laboriously. “So very... very sorry. But he’s just... too dangerous to trust. Too... too many risks.” She rose, and woke a spell she’d been carefully building for the past few days, hidden in the signatures of the medical machinery. Light gleamed around the corners of the room, hiding what was about to happen.

Linith paused where she lay, whining faintly from the effort. It hurt. Oh it hurt to push herself like this. It was like trying to breathe in low pressure. She could feel the weight of her own mind, gasping for every last drip of mana it could get from Precia and not getting what it needed. The intricate structure of her uplifted mind was slowly crumbling. She was forgetting things, a sad slow tragic reversal of the burst of purple brilliance that had seen her awakening to consciousness.

Gathering the Jewel Seeds to her, she mustered the effort to stand again and slowly began to build power. In fits and starts, line-by-line, a Midchildan casting circle traced itself on the floor around her. It was dim and muted, and it flickered uncertainly, but she bore down past the awful ache within, forcing it to her exhausted will.

Tan light built. Gathered.

Vanished.

She appeared again in darkness. She didn’t know where, exactly. Two, maybe three dimensions away. And far from any planet. Off to one side, the sun was small and dim, still outshining other stars but less than half as bright as it had been on Earth.

Good.

That meant she was further out from it. Light-minutes away from her starting point. She couldn’t say where, exactly, but she wouldn’t be surprised if she were close to the edge of the inner system.

And not knowing was the point.

Slowly, achingly, she brought out the Jewel Seeds again. For what felt like a long, long time, she stared at them, etching their light into her mind, burning it through the haze that was filling her head.

Then, with a flick of her wrist and a tiny shunt of magic, she sent them shooting off into the void.

The violet lanterns quickly receded to dots, and then specks, and then mere pinpricks against the infinite dark. Within a minute, they were gone completely. They might be pulled into orbit around a planet in the outer system, but she doubted it. More likely they would keep going forever, spreading out as they went. Sailing away from the system, away from humanity and those that might misuse their power.

They would never be found in the vast emptiness of space, sealed and secured as they were from releasing the tiniest trace of mana. Locked down as they were, their own output caging their attempts to activate, even a dimensional quake wouldn’t disturb them. Centred back in the inner system, even a fairly powerful one would be hard-pressed to reach the outermost planets, and in a few months they would be further even than that.

“There,” Linith sighed in relief. “My part is done. Fate, Nanoha... it’s up to you now...”

Her arms were going numb, but she managed to twitch her decohering fingers in a jerky motion. The command was crude and clumsy, but it was enough for her Barrier Jacket to respond.

A picture formed in front of her. It showed a warm room, lit by gentle light from a pair of sun lamps in the corners. Fate and Nanoha stood with happy smiles, holding hands, with Alicia beaming up at the camera in front of them. Vesta and Arf sat in their six-year old forms at their mistresses’ feet; Vesta hugging Nanoha’s legs, Arf leaning back against Fate’s. The little catgirl was sticking her tongue out playfully, and Arf was laughing.

And behind them all, Precia sat with a blissful smile, her eyes on Alicia, and Linith beside her as ever. Her skin had more colour in it than Linith had seen in months, and her eyes had no bags beneath them. She looked... happy.

They all did.

They all had been.

Kaisers willing, they would be.

But not all of them together. Not anymore.

“My girls,” Linith whispered. A tear trickled down her cheek, then another. “My brave, wonderful girls. Forgive me. I sh-shouldn’t have told you to go to Scagletti. I just w-wanted to s-save her. But now I... I have to do this. Because I... I didn’t want her to die. Even though she told me that... I’m so sorry. Forgive me for this. Forgive me for... for not letting you know to say goodbye.”

Her vision was growing dark, and she could feel her body starting to drift away, the mana construct that had held her for five long years finally beginning to break down. Maybe... maybe without the strain of supporting her, Precia might have a chance now. She would die, but her sacrifice might give her mistress the strength to pull through. She could live with that. And die with it.

The picture stayed there, in her blurring vision and then in her mind’s sight as her eyes closed for the last time. She clung to it as she fell away, drifting in the void, drifting apart, drifting into darkness. The colours, the laughter, the joy of that remembered day seemed so vivid that she could almost reach out and step into it again, a haven where she and all her loved ones were safe and happy and together.

“Be happy...” she breathed, in the merest ghost of a whisper.

And as the break-up of her form reached her face, she was smiling still.

...

Silent and tranquil, curled into a ball, a sandy-furred forest cat floated through space. If one could see its face, they might have seen the frozen tear tracks glinting on the tan-brown fur. Onwards and outwards it drifted, following the secrets it had taken to the grave.

...

Gil Graham’s ship was with the slowly-assembling fleet, a light-minute or so from Earth. Chrono stopped off on a nearby world instead of teleporting to it straight from the Asura, and went through the standard handshake protocols to be allowed through. He was met in the teleport room by a young officer whose sallow skin and baggy eyes spoke of more than a few sleepless nights. Given the reason the fleet was assembling, Chrono didn’t blame the man.

“Enforcer Harlaown,” he greeted Chrono. “I’m Ensign Altima. What’s your reason for your visit?”

Chrono ‘s expression didn’t flicker. He’d considered how to handle this on his stopover. He preferred having a better plan than the one he’d put together, but it was all he had. If his hunch was wrong, it wouldn’t matter.

If it was _right_...

“Aria and Lotte,” he answered smoothly. “They were my teachers when I was younger, and we stayed friendly even after we parted ways.”

The ensign hesitated, his eyes flickering up and to the left for a second. Chrono watched him carefully. “Uh, the Admiral’s familiars are on a scouting mission at the moment,” he said, and Chrono felt a stab of triumph and fear. Had that pause been nervousness, or just a moment’s recollection? He wasn’t committed yet; he could still back out of this plan. Shrug, go back to the Asura – even if Lindy asked later, he could just say he wanted to get their advice on his research.

He clenched his hand hard; nails biting into his palm. No. If he was wrong, he’d be embarrassed. He’d look stupid or paranoid, and possibly get a reprimand for rash action. But if he explained himself, Lindy and Gil would understand. That was a minor cost, compared to the consequences if he was right and backed out now. And he wasn’t going to let fear of being wrong stop him now.

“I didn’t say I was here to see them now,” he said, projecting confidence and hoping his pause hadn’t been noticed through Altima’s own nervousness. “They’ve asked for my help on a mission from the Admiral.” There. A tiny widening of the eyes. Chrono nodded. “Yes, the classified one. It’s crucial, so they need all the help they can get. And they can’t trust many people with something this sensitive.”

Tension sang through him like a taut wire. He was basing his entire cover on an assumption and a bluff; a series of ‘if’s that was far longer than he liked to rely on. _If_ Gil really did know more about the case than he was letting on, he’d probably be acting on it somehow. _If_ he was acting on it, he’d probably use Aria and Lotte, as the most loyal of his powerful subordinates. _If_ they were acting on covert orders, they’d presumably have to explain their absences somehow. And he was willing to bet that their professionalism would keep them from giving many, if any details about a mission to anyone who didn’t absolutely need to know them.

That gave him an opening. _If_ he could act the part.

Altima looked at him uncertainly, and Chrono’s hand tightened on his Device, hovering over the mental command that would allow it to receive Mei’s waiting message. But then – thankfully – his expression cleared into understanding as some internal realisation slotted into place. Never had Chrono been more thankful for his reputation as a rules-bound tight-arse. The fact that nobody would expect a scheme like this from him was his biggest asset right now.

“Oh...” Altima said. “Oh, right. Yeah, I guess... I guess I can see why they’d ask you to help. Uh, if you’re not here to see them, what are you here for?”

Some of the humming tension in Chrono’s spine seeped out. Okay. He had one foot through the door. And the ensign didn’t seem inclined to check his story with the Aria, Lotte or the Admiral – which was why he’d come now, while Gil was still busy with the conference.

“I’d like to look at the ship records and bring myself fully up to speed,” he said. “Aria and Lotte didn’t want to say too much in a message. Op-sec; you know the score.” He tried a smile, which seemed to relax Altima a notch further. He nodded and gestured for Chrono to follow him.

“Yeah, obviously,” he agreed. “Standard procedure for a leak. Uh... FM 36-40, chapter 2. Right?” He looked back hopefully, eager to impress the younger, higher-ranking officer.

It took considerable willpower not to freeze rigid. “That’s right,” Chrono said, aware that his voice sounded a little strained. He smiled again and tipped his head. “Good memory.”

Altima seemed happy with that and turned back to where he was leading them, which let Chrono very quietly freak out behind him. A leak. A _TSAB leak_ ; standard procedure on what to do in the case of suspected corruption or an otherwise compromised incident. Exactly what he’d been thinking when Gil had slipped. Whoever was helping the Book’s master, they were _within the Bureau_. And Gil knew, or at least suspected, who they were.

No wonder Altima had believed him about Aria and Lotte recruiting him. Given Chrono’s reputation for following the rules to the letter, _he’d_ have asked himself to help with something like this in their position. Except they hadn’t, which meant they were seriously worried; unable to trust anyone but Gil’s personal crew with even as much as the suspicion of a leak.

This was very, very bad.

“Enforcer Harlaown? We’re here. Archival.” Altima gestured awkwardly at the cramped office space they’d arrived at. Computer banks lined the walls and stood in; rows through the middle of the room; crystal memory substrate stacked in dull geometric shapes inside them. It was empty, with nobody sitting at the terminals dotted here and there among the banks.

Chrono glanced over at his escort. “I’ll understand if you can’t leave me in here unsupervised,” he said agreeably. “But would you mind waiting on the other side of the room? Some of these materials are sensitive.”

“Of course, of course.” The ensign hurried over to sit down across from him, and Chrono settled himself down in front of a terminal, pulled up a holo-window from his Device and starting to sort through ingoing and outgoing personnel timestamps. After a few minutes, he frowned slightly and leaned in, pulling up more windows from the terminal. A high-priority inbound courier report led him to a materiel transfer receipt, which in turn led to the requisition form that had prompted it. He checked the date, frown deepening, and backed out of the system before burrowing back in to check the ship’s armoury. It denied him access to any of the specifications or details, but he was able to claw out a name to go with the high-priority delivery. A name that sent chills up his spine.

CSD-D33E-1 “Durandal”.

After an instructive half-hour or so, he stood, jaw tightly clenched. Altima looked up quickly with the guilty expression of someone who had definitely not been playing games on his Device to pass the time.

“You’re done? Uh, I think Aria and Lotte are due back sometime soon. Would -”

[Impact Cannon. Ring Bind.]

Ensign Altima’s eyes barely had time to widen before he hit the floor. Chrono bent automatically to check his breathing and pulse, nodded in satisfaction and dragged him over to the desk, arranging him so he looked like he’d fallen asleep. The Device, he pocketed. It might get him through a few doors.

Then he set off for Admiral Gil’s Graham’s office.

...

“First decoy, mark. And go.”

It was early afternoon back on Earth. The twenty fourth of December. Christmas Eve.

None of the Wolkenritter were feeling very festive.

It was late evening here, on a hilltop outside the city that was their target. One of the only three sizeable mage populations in the nearby dimensional neighbourhood, outside Earth itself. The few trees clinging to the ground beneath their smothering layers of snow were stunted conifers, huddled around the shore of a frozen lake as though leaning into each other for warmth. On the other side of the flat expanse was the city proper. The ice hung back from the far shore; heat from the city and the passage of fishing boats keeping it from freezing over. From a distance, the soot falling from industrial chimneys churned it black and murky to match the snow that fell and mingled with rising columns of smoke.

Three figures stood on the empty hillside. One, tall and angular, watched the city impassively. The second; short and bright red against the stark monochrome surroundings, paced in frustration and looked everywhere other than their target. The third simply sat on a tree stump, her eyes on her hands.

“Can-” began Vita after a few more rounds of pacing.

“No,” Shamal replied, almost before the syllable was out. “Another ten minutes. We want to be third.”

The Breaker clenched her teeth and growled. Zafira had successfully argued that he should be the one to stay back and guard Hayate. Shamal could do little for her at this point, and he was a better defender should the worst happen. Right now, Vita almost wished she’d been the one to stay behind.

But while that might free her of the nagging sense of personal dishonour, it would mean not knowing what was happening at all. Having no hand in events. Waiting, helpless, for news of success... or of failure.

“Second decoy, mark,” said Shamal. “And... go. Third decoy pending for after we go.”

Vita glanced over at the city for a brief instant before her eyes skittered away again. There were people in that city. Children in hospitals – or the closest local equivalents. Mothers and sisters. Kind people, who would help strangers out of nothing but the goodness of their hearts. Who had families that cared for them, and would be devastated if they were hurt.

But they weren’t Hayate.

“Five minutes,” said Signum, her eyes not wavering from the soot-stained buildings. “Get ready. Try to stay non-lethal.”

Vita caught a very slight wince from Shamal. ‘Try’. That was what they were left with, now. Not even absolute obedience to the letter of Hayate’s wishes. And any pretence at following the spirit had long since died.

‘ _Try_ to stay non-lethal’. What right had they to call themselves her knights?

“Standby,” Signum ordered. “Make ready to go.”

Vita gritted her teeth and set up Graf Eisen with a practiced swing. If a Belkan lord thought it better to die than pay the cost of survival, honour forbade their servants from going against their wishes.

The wind picked up, swirling the soot and snow around them.

But Hayate wasn’t a Belkan lord. She hadn’t been raised with that code. She was nothing like the proud, arrogant, ancient men and women who dimly lingered in Vita’s memory.

She didn’t deserve to die for their ideals of right and wrong.

Signum’s sword rose. And fell.

“Go.”

...

Linith was gone.

It was impossible to wrap her head around. Linith was _gone_. _Linith_ was gone. Warm, calm, maternal, empathetic Linith. The closest thing to a replacement for her own mother that Nanoha had had for the past six months. The pillar of normality and dependability in a scary, chaotic, confusing, frustrating universe.

Was gone.

It just refused to make sense. Nanoha half-expected her to walk into the canteen where they had congregated after the emotionally exhausting ordeal of Precia’s goodbyes, ask what was wrong in that concerned way she had and then usher them all around one table for hot chocolate.

But she wasn’t. Linith was gone. Nanoha’s mind ran in circles, spiralling the drain of this one incontrovertible fact.

And if _she_ was feeling numb and shocked and heartbroken, she couldn’t imagine what Alicia and Fate must be going through. Whatever mental preparations Fate had been exercising in case... in case the worst happened with Precia, _which it wouldn’t_ ; they’d never accounted for this. She had been gazing blankly at the far wall for the past five minutes or so, and Nanoha was afraid that something inside her friend had shut down completely. Reaching out, she gave Fate a one-armed cuddle. But Fate wasn’t crying. Wasn’t even responding. She had just shut down entirely.

Alicia had cried herself to sleep about an hour ago after a screaming fit that Nanoha was trying not to think about. There would be another one when the little girl woke up and remembered, she knew. It was not something she was looking forward to.

They weren’t even sure exactly when it had happened. The machines hadn’t registered any change in Precia’s condition. If it hadn’t been for Uno checking the room twenty minutes or so after they’d left, they might still not know – and Nanoha thanked every higher power she could think of that it hadn’t been Fate who’d walked in and made that discovery.

“They should have told us,” she murmured out loud. “If Precia had... had got that bad. That Linith... the machines should have told us.”

 _‘... maybe there wasn’t anything to tell,’_ suggested Arf. Vesta shot her a warning look and a hiss, but she soldiered on. _‘No, really. Maybe... maybe they didn’t tell us because... because Precia hadn’t got that bad.’_

“... what are you saying?” said Nanoha. Something ugly twisted in her gut. She could feel understanding on the edge of her mind, and shied away from it instinctively.

Arf looked up at Fate from her unresponsive mistress’s lap, and licked her lips nervously. _‘Maybe...’_ she said slowly, forcing every word out. _‘Um. Maybe she... didn’t just... fade. There should have been a... a body. If she had. A cat body.’_ She closed her eyes, and went for broke. _‘So maybe she knew it was coming and thought that Precia might have a chance without her and-’_

“No!” Nanoha’s hand slammed down on the table so hard that it made Jail, head pillowed on his arms on the next table over, jerk up for a moment to see what the noise had been. He stared at them from bleary owl-golden eyes, then lowered his head again. “ _No_ ,” she repeated in a lower voice than the shrill shriek of her first exclamation. “That isn’t... it doesn’t... she _wouldn’t_.”

Horrible silence was broken by an awkwardly cleared throat. Blankly, Nanoha looked down at the grey and black kitten on the table in front of her.

 _‘... she would, mistress,’_ Vesta said quietly. Gently. No tone could make it gentle enough, though. All hints of anger fled from Nanoha’s face, leaving behind naked horror. She shook her head slowly, lips forming into a soundless ‘no’ as tears filled her eyes.

 _‘She would,’_ Vesta repeated, stepping closer and putting a paw on Nanoha’s hand. _‘If it meant Precia might have a chance, where both of them wouldn’t have any. She would.’_

Nanoha was saved from having to answer that by the sound of shouting.

“Doctor! _Doctor!_ ”

There was real alarm in Uno’s voice as she ran – actually _ran_ – into the canteen. Her yellow eyes were wide and her hair was dishevelled and wet. She was wearing a Number-style jumpsuit and it wouldn’t have surprised Nanoha to find out that she had been in the shower and loaded the first clothes to hand. It was the first time Nanoha had heard Uno be so expressive, and from the stunned looks around them, it wasn’t common. Sein actually fell off her seat in surprise. Fate jolted out of whatever inner world she’d been in, hand immediately going for Bardiche.

“Uno?” Tired as he looked, Jail was instantly on his feet and moving towards her to see what the problem was. He needn’t have bothered. With a sweeping motion, her collection of screens expanded out to fill the entire wall of the canteen. They shared a disturbing commonality of theme.

 _‘... why are they all red?’_ Vesta asked, cocking her head with a worried look. “Is it... is someone, uh...”

She trailed off, unable to think of a lighthearted guess to relieve the tension.

“The Wolkenritter are attacking,” Uno said bluntly, ignoring her. “Not a minor attack on an isolated target. Not even a covert strike on a few mages caught in a dimensional barrier. They launched an outright assault on four magic-heavy cities approximately thirty minutes ago, holding nothing back. Uminari City on UA-97 is among them.”

Nanoha went dead white for the second time in as many minutes, this time from an entirely different sense of horror. “That’s... that’s twenty light-minutes away,” she whispered. “We have to go! We have to go now!”

“Four worlds,” said Fate, drawing all eyes to her. It was the first she’d said in the hour or so since Alicia had fallen asleep, and her words were precisely enunciated – almost mechanical. “That means they’ve left the master unguarded?”

Uno hesitated. Her eyes flickered rapidly for a moment, and she grimaced, bringing a hand up to cradle her temple. “No,” she said. “It’s probable that one or more of the attacks are decoys. Most likely, all but one are false – that would get them maximum concentration of force and require the greatest dispersal of opposing assets to be sure of stopping them.”

“Three fakes and one real attack, then.” Fate’s face was still drawn, and there was still that aching sadness in her eyes that Nanoha longed to reach out and fix. But she was responding again as she got to her feet; thinking, planning. “It’s already been going on for at least twenty minutes. We’ll exhaust ourselves if we push to get there as fast as possible, so...”

“You might not, actually,” Jail interrupted. “I do have a teleport boosting station here. We could supply the power. But you’d have to be sure of getting the right one – if you chose wrong, you’d waste time and mana hopping to the next site. And we can’t be sure they aren’t all decoys, and that they might not wait for Bureau forces to arrive, dismiss their true target as a false alarm and leave again before starting their attack.”

Vesta worked through this sneakiness for a moment, and gave him a deeply impressed look.

“Uno?” Fate asked. “Can you bring up a map?” The teenager nodded, wincing a little as she did, and summoned a simplified node-map of the dimensional neighbourhood. Four planets glowed white among the cyan dots, bright against the dark blue background. Their own location was marked in green, and numbers hovered next to each node showing the time-distance to them. Earth was the closest at twenty one light-minutes away. UA-104 and UA-115 were next; equidistant at about twenty four light-minutes each, while UA-218 was a lonely point of cyan a shade less than half an hour away. Fate pursed her lips.

“Nanoha. You’re going to Earth?” Nanoha nodded firmly. “I can’t talk you out of it?” Fate asked hopefully. “You haven’t been drained yet. If they get you...”

“I’m going.” There was absolutely no room for argument in Nanoha’s tone. Uno rolled her eyes, turning back to the screens and scowling at them through a fast-developing migraine. Fate nodded.

“So that leaves one of three for me.” She bit her lip. Although the closer planets were about equidistant from Jail’s base, there was still a good five or six light-minutes between them. The wrong choice could add another ten minutes to her journey – a potentially fatal delay for who knew how many people.

“I’ll go to UA-115”, she decided. It was the closer only by ten light-seconds or so, but she needed to make a choice. “If that’s the wrong one, I can move onto UA-104 and then either keep going to 218 or circle back to help Nanoha on Earth.”

“No, hold on...” Uno was typing rapidly. “218 is a decoy. A very good decoy, but I think they must have miscast whatever’s generating it.” Her eyes flitted across the streams of data – readouts that the girls couldn’t even begin to make sense of. “It could just be signal distortion, but the likelihood is higher that it’s one of the fakes.”

“... understood.” Fate nodded. “In that case... I’ll go to UA-104 first, then. Doctor? The teleport booster?”

“This way.”

Nanoha left first. Perhaps inefficient given her nearer destination, but the fear in her eyes for her family was such that nobody even tried to suggest otherwise. The greasy feeling of mana gathering built up to oppressive levels in the small rune-lined room as Jail, Fate, Arf and Uno waited in the control booth next door. Vesta sat a silent vigil in Nanoha’s hood; her tail and neck ruff fluffed out. Nanoha herself was pale with dread, but determined. She clutched Raising Heart like a lifeline, the Jewel Seed casing already deployed and ready to fuel her spells.

With a flash of light and an outright painful backlash, she was gone. Fate flinched and Uno actually cried out, clutching her forehead. She waved Jail off when he went to help.

“It’s fine, I’m fine. My implants are overtaxed, I need to... lie down. Somewhere cool. But not now. Testarossa; in. You can’t aim a twenty-four light-minute jump any more than Takamachi; just stay relaxed and don’t fight it.”

Fate nodded seriously and transformed. Her new Barrier Jacket assembled itself around her, a familiar feeling made novel again by Alicia’s alterations. It wasn’t as strange as the first time, but-

... no. If she thought about the first time now, she’d think of... of other things. Things that would get in the way. Mother had taught her better than to let her feelings interfere with what needed to be done. She beckoned Arf up into her backpack, imagining a pinpoint in her abdomen and pushing the surging grief into it.

Don’t think of what had just happened. Think of what was about to. She was safer than Nanoha, in some ways. There was no chance of the Wolkenritter draining her again. They couldn’t, now.

She just hoped that didn’t lead them to kill her instead.

There was no sense of time passing in mid-teleport. It took however long it took on the outside. Within, it was an eyeblink of stretched experience. But Fate was very aware as the world dissolved and reformed around her that another twenty four minutes had passed, on top of the half-hour or so it had taken for news of the attack to reach them. Fifty minutes; perhaps a little more. How quickly could the Wolkenritter bring down a city? The cold bit at her cheeks as she appeared above Akkamar – the city Nanoha had visited so very recently, she recalled. Smoke and snowflakes filled the air. The snowflakes were hard and stinging; whipped by the wind into near-hail.

The smoke, though, wasn’t coming from the chimneys and factories below. It was coming from the fire. It seemed like half the city was ruined; half of the remainder seemed mostly untouched so far. Below her, in the last quarter, Fate could hear the sounds of battle. Buildings were broken open or burning. Civilians lay slumped prone on the ground – either unconscious or dead, there was no way to tell. Some of them wore TSAB uniforms, she noticed. Apparently the Bureau forces had been closer, and quicker to respond.

It hadn’t helped them. And she could see why.

In the skies across the city from her, a red blur moved in jagged bursts against a brown one, clashing with great booms that shook the city. The Breaker, battling the huge Bureau mage who had fought her mother on the Garden of Time.

And there below her, casually batting aside the desperate attempts at a massed assault by some of the natives, was the long pink hair and blurring sword of the Blade. Above one hand the dark shape of one of the Book floated, and even as she fought it pulled glowing cores out of the chests of the fallen. 

They weren’t taking it slow and careful. Not anymore. Fate swallowed and clutched Bardiche tighter.

 _‘This time, I’ve got your back,’_ Arf reminded her. _‘And they can’t drain you twice.’_

Fate nodded once. Set her jaw. And dived.

...

Freshly returned from an exhausting conference, Gil Graham had barely sat down at his desk when the sound of a scuffle drew his attention away from the many, many screens floating above it. The desk itself was wooden; an antique he’d brought from his childhood home. The projectors and crystalline computer racks that had been seamlessly integrated into it weren’t part of the original design, but they did nothing to spoil the pleasant lines of the old mahogany.

Admittedly, standard holowindows looked a little incongruous when paired with it, but he’d long since fixed that with a custom template that matched the varnish and gave them an almost Victorian air. It was usually a refreshing breath of classical styles among the steel and glass and crystal of his workspaces, which was let down a little at the moment by the fact that most of them were showing him reports on the catastrophe that had brought him back here earlier than planned.

The raised voices outside his office resolved into something more audible. “I said stop!” his secretary was shouting. “The admiral... Admiral Graham! There-”

The doors slid sharply open, and Chrono Harlaown marched in, more or less ignoring the harassed-looking man who was trying to pull him back. Despite the fact that he had almost a foot of height on the boy, he seemed unwilling to resort to physical force to get him to stop. He was also cradling a rather tender-looking wrist. Gil sighed and collapsed his windows. Whatever this was about, it was probably going to take valuable time to deal with.

Chrono came to attention in front of his desk, and Gil fixed him with his third-best unimpressed look. Before he could inquire what the reason for his visit was, though – it certainly wasn’t a social call – Chrono spoke.

“A backer,” he said.

Gil didn’t react outwardly, except to raise an eyebrow and motion his secretary away. “Thank you, Faden,” he said. “Enforcer Harlaown seems to have some critical information for me; you can return to your desk.”

They waited for the man to leave. As soon as the door hissed closed, Chrono reconfigured his Device and began casting a comprehensive net of anti-scrying, privacy and transmission jamming wards. Gil’s eyebrow rose further. It was an impressive feat for a fourteen-year old, although from the activity on his Storage Device he’d clearly come pre-prepared. He waited patiently for Chrono to finish, dropping a hand quietly into a desk drawer while the boy’s attention was on his spellcasting.

“ _A_ backer,” Chrono repeated once he was done, as if he hadn’t so much as paused. He seemed agitated, almost vibrating on the spot as his muscles tensed and relaxed repeatedly. “Not ‘backers’, not ‘backing’. ‘Backer’. One person. It jumped out at me, in the meeting. Not just the word itself, but something about the way you said it.”

Ah. So. Gil glanced down at his watch, feeling suddenly tired. He’d been running far, far too long under stress. A mistake here or there was inevitable, in time. A slip of the tongue could be excused, but Chrono wouldn’t be here if that was all he had.

“At ease, Enforcer,” he sighed. “Is this leading somewhere? We do have a crisis at hand.”

“The Masked Men, too,” Chrono continued, pacing. “Exceptional at shielding. Pinpoint accurate rapid teleportation. At least two of them; high-rank. The one Scrya fought was a close-range monster... and a familiar, to boot. So I began to wonder. I thought perhaps you knew more than you were letting on.” He laughed; a disbelieving breath that was more scoff than humour. “I had it wrong at first, though. I thought you suspected who the backer was. That you’d set Aria and Lotte to... to infiltrate; get close to the Wolkenritter and identify the master and the backer. One masked man looks just like another, right? And the one Scrya fought was just watching, not acting directly.”

His hands curled into fists for a moment. “I didn’t want to think it. That’s my only excuse for guessing wrong. But then I came here to dig into things. See what you were keeping back. And I saw the timestamps of their absences.”

Gil raised a finger, only for Chrono to swing around and glare at him. “And the way you pushed through a requisition for an Eidelon-class sealing device. _Before_ we knew we were dealing with the Book for certain. I recognised the serial code after familiarising myself with them. After all, Takamachi got her hands on a device with that classification.”

The finger lowered. A hint of movement behind Chrono caught Gil’s attention in his peripheral vision, and he breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Trembling with tightly wound anger, Chrono didn’t catch the slight relaxation.

“Admiral Graham,” he demanded, “what are you _doing?_ ”

“We’re saving the world.”

Chrono’s shoulders hunched and his stance shifted defensively as the Lieze twins stalked past him on either side to flank Gil protectively. Fierce eyes bored into him, alert for any movement.

Gil leaned forward and folded his hands together on the desk.

“I think it’s clear you know essentially what I’m doing,” he began. “So perhaps instead I should explain why.”

The angry glare wavered for a moment before settling into a blank mask that gave away nothing. Or nearly nothing, at least. Talented as he was, Chrono was fourteen years old, and Gil had years of experience for every month of his. What he could make out from the young Enforcer was promising. He seemed willing to listen, at least. Hopefully that willingness wouldn’t be pushed too far by what Gil had to say.

“I suppose the story ultimately starts with your father,” he said, watching Chrono carefully. His stare got a little more intense, but he didn’t move. Gil sighed, feeling the old pang of loss again. “Clyde... Clyde was a skilled officer, and a clever one. You haven’t seen the full report of the 0054 Book of Darkness incident – very few people have – but the _Estia_ managed to do quite serious damage to it when it went rampant. Enough that parts of its internal structure began to unfold out into realspace. No witnesses survived, but long-range imaging showed a tumorous mass of some sort that attempted to engulf the ship. Clyde was actually _inside_ the Book as it was destroyed.”

He took in the tension slowly ratcheting up in Chrono’s frame, and raised his hands in apology. “I’m not telling you this needlessly. Clyde saw something in there. Exactly what, I’m not sure – he was injured by that point, and I’m not sure it was describable. From what I’ve decoded, the Book of Darkness was trying to physically interface with him using some kind of folded space. But he managed to get a message out. Short-range. One-way. Poor quality, but decipherable with time and effort. My ship was the only one within range, and... I suppose he trusted me to use the information wisely.”

Chrono blinked. Then blinked again, his eyes widening. “The master. The... the selection algorithms. He saw who it would choose next.”

Gil tilted his head approvingly. “Who it was in the process of choosing, technically. It was heavily damaged by that point, and I suspect it knew it was statistically likely to be destroyed and had already begun selecting its next host. The message, once I’d made sense of it, was a shortlist of three locations – I suppose it somehow scans distant areas for linker cores that can support it in dormancy, somehow. Regardless of how it found them, I had a starting point to follow it from. Then it was just a matter of careful observation until I found the master.”

“And decided to help them.” Chrono frowned. “Why not tell the Bureau? No, hold on.” He pressed his lips together, mind racing. “Even if you had told them, and suppressed the master before the Book’s completion, it would recreate itself elsewhere again, and leave you with no lead. Earth would be spared, but the Book would still return to plague Dimensional Space again. But you can’t do anything to it! At most... at most you could evacuate the host away from any population centres and that is _standing policy_.” His eyes were almost wild. “Why would you keep it to yourself?”

“Because we have a way to stop it. Permanently,” Aria said, her voice flat and level..”

“No. That’s... that’s impossible!”

“It is _not_ ,” Gil contradicted firmly. “I’ve known about the master for seven years now. Over that time, I’ve scanned them as delicately as I’ve been able to; covertly probing the Book of Darkness program for as much information as I can gather without prompting it to activate. Mostly passive scans, a few very careful active probes that were rigorously engineered to seem like natural mana fluctuations.” He cracked his knuckles. “I know more about it than anyone else alive. Perhaps more than anyone since the Dawn States.

“As far as I can tell – and since it activated I’ve been able to get more data to confirm this – it still hasn’t fully repaired all of the damage done in the last incident. I’m not even sure it can. Some of the functions appear to be permanently lost, though I can’t be sure while it’s still dormant. And, well...” He pursed his lips. “I know Lieutenant Jhanashdi believes the Healer is the Wraith, but I’m not sure the records of there being five Knights in the past should be dismissed out of hand. Perhaps the Healer and the Wraith suffered data corruption and one was used to repair the other.”

He tapped the table for emphasis. “In other words, while the Book is in its fully activated state, it is at its most powerful... but also at its most _vulnerable_. It can be damaged, and damaged permanently. And, relevantly to our situation...”

He held up the white card-form he had quietly taken from his desk drawer. A blue diamond gem sparkled at the centre of the inert Device, flanked by two stylised wings.

“... it can be sealed.”

“So that is Durandal,” Chrono said tensely.

“Yes. One of the Eidelon-class Devices commissioned after the 0054 Incident. With this, it should be possible to freeze both the Book and its master at the peak of the activation cycle, and seal them together. The master will not die, the Book will not be damaged – and so its reincarnation cycle will not trigger. It can then be stored in an ultrahigh security location.”

“It will work,” Aria added. “We’ve found precedent in the records. Other Logia have been neutralised in similar manners throughout history and have never escaped.”

“It’s the only way to stop it for good!” Lotte urged. “All of the masters before now have been killed, and none of them have stopped it destroying lives!”

“You came here looking for a fight,” Aria said, voice softening. “But Chrono, there’s no shame in changing your mind. This is for the best. Surely you can see that.”

His eyes flickered between them, assessing. He frowned.

“That was another question I had,” he said, a hint of doubt playing over his face. “That war form you used when you fought Scrya. That wasn’t a natural familiar shape. You should have looked like Takamachi’s familiar, instead... what caused that?”

Graham didn’t buy the graceless change of subject, but he smiled nonetheless. “Ah, yes. My girls are far from normal familiars. You see, I’m an old man. I don’t go in the field at all. I don’t really do much magic nowadays. But I needed active agents to monitor the Book. And I _have_ spent the last decade studying the formation and creation of familiars, with an eye to the dangers of the Book of Darkness. I found certain plug-in code functions from Belkan Guardian Beasts that I managed to add to their programmes. Very inefficient, of course, and makes the two of them very power hungry. But... I don’t do much heavy magic any more, now do I?”

He grinned. In a way, it was a relief to finally have someone to talk to about this. Someone other than the girls themselves. And if he was honest, it was nice to have a chance to boast a little. “In a very real sense, they’re not really cat familiars any more. There’s some wolf in them, and more than a little bear. The trick is to compare the end products, the operational familiar, not the raw spell. And then you just have to look at the way the code runs, and try to replicate such things in your own familiars, one teeny tiny step at a time. I did ask Aria and Lotte if they were willing to undergo such experimentation.”

“We agreed,” Aria put in unnecessarily.

“Of course we did!” Lotte added. “It makes us better!”

“Their bodies are just mana shell constructs.” Gil explained, turning to smile at the pair of them. They preened smugly. “Take the code from another programme wholesale... ironically, I got the inspiration for that from how the Book of Darkness absorbs Linker cores... and they can become _anything_. And incidentally, their _own_ native programming handles mixing forms, once you’ve added those to their data-bases. I believe the original Alhazredian spell was designed to handle this. I just rediscovered how to re-implement lost functionality.” 

“And I’ve helped to refine our own code,” Aria added with a quiet smile. “The mistake masters make when experimenting on their familiars is using them purely as test subjects. But... Chrono, you don’t understand how it feels. It feels right. I’d always tell Gil if an alteration felt wrong. I’ve rejected changes before because they didn’t feel right.”

“The changes feel like things we were always meant to do!” Lotte insisted. “It’s not like we’ve had anything like those barbaric cyborg experiments done to us! It’s like it’s fixing ways we were broken!”

Gil smiled indulgently at her. “I’m simplifying of course; I had to add transgenic elements to their base forms, but that could be done, and it doesn’t show; they still look like cats. I’ve always been fascinated by Familiar Theory, you know. I’ve been making incremental improvements for decades. Aria and Lotte are the most refined model yet.”

He turned back to Chrono, who was... a lot less appreciative than expected. He was, in fact, gaping in horror.

“What-” he stuttered, “what do you mean, you invented or... or rediscovered or... or _something_ a way of chimerising Familiars? It’s... it’s an Alhazredian spell! You... you don’t tamper with that! That’s incredibly amoral! How many of your familiars died in testing! That’s... what kind of person would even do that! You can’t have done it on your own!”

“But I did,” Gil said, softly.

“It was necessary.” Aria said in a steely tone, drawing his attention to herself before he could continue accusing Gil. She traded a quick glance with Lotte, who stepped around in front of the desk again, shaking her limbs out with subtle motions. “Be reasonable, Chrono. We taught you all you know, and you don’t stand a chance against Lotte in close combat. Even before we bring war forms into it.”

“We’ve already sacrificed TSAB officers to feed the Book,” Lotte reminded him, low and lethal. “You could help us with this – your ice affinity would work well with Durandal. But we only have a few minutes after it goes rampant to freeze it. We can’t let you interfere in that.”

“Help us,” Aria implored. “This is the best and only way, Chrono. Help us, or you spend the rest of the conflict locked up here, and we let you do whatever you want once it’s all over. It won’t be long now. A day, maybe. Less. Then you can take it to the Bureau. We’ll be court-martialled. But the threat of the Book will be gone.”

Gil hung his head, exhaustion weighing on his soul. The faith they had, his girls; it still stunned him. Faith in the plan. Faith in him. It was painful to hear them speak it so plainly, with no trace of doubt or shame. It was one of the things that reminded him that they weren’t human.

Chrono didn’t reply. He didn’t try to fight. He just stood there, staring with wide, wild eyes at his teachers and the man who had made them. It wasn’t that he was hiding his emotions, Gil thought. He honestly wasn’t sure about what to do.

Two familiars and two humans waited in silence for him to choose.

...

Above, the heavy snow clouds reflected the firelight of the burning city below. The skies were painted the cherry-red of cooling iron.

Nearly four years of high-speed combat training had taught Fate to think very, very fast in a fight. She sped through a tactical analysis as she dropped through the snow and smoke towards the soot-blackened city below. Her greatest advantages were speed and agility. The Blade was fast, but she was confident that she was – slightly – faster. Beyond that, their positions were reversed from their last encounter. Now, the Blade was the one with a stationary objective – and Fate the one who could hit and run as she liked. She could strike at the Book copy the Blade carried and force her to defend it, while Fate had Arf on her side, and could ignore her own defence to focus entirely on breaking her opponent’s. It was a risk she wouldn’t take if not for the fact that the Knights seemed strangely reluctant to kill.

And last but not least; every second and every mote of power the Blade spent fighting her was wasted. Fate had already been drained once. She couldn’t be drained again.

Those were her advantages. Against them, she set the Blade’s. Greater reach, and a more combat-hardened Device. Power – even with the Jewel Seed providing a counter to the cartridge system, Fate knew the Blade had an edge on her in burst strength. The inhuman endurance of a mana construct, and a near-immunity to pain or debilitation from anything less than catastrophic wounds. A thousand years of experience, and three allies to Fate’s one.

And, potentially, the willingness to go lethal if Fate proved herself enough of a threat.

Put like that, Fate sort of wished she had more advantages on her side. And come to think of it, she did have one more. Surprise.

But she only had it for one shot.

Fate took in a deep breath, glad that her filters were keeping the smoke out. She flexed her fingers, testing how well Alicia’s new design of undersuit would protect her. It was almost like Alicia was here with her, her cleverness protecting her sister. The two of them were together. Here, she didn’t have to think about... about Mother. Here she had an enemy, one that she just had to beat. 

It was good. It was reassuring. It made her feel less... wobbly.

She let out her breath, and dropped like a missile. Fate came down like an avenging angel, crackling scythe held high, and blurred the last twenty metres or so in a Blitz Action. The Blade had the natives corralled in the coils of her sword’s chain form, and her attention was on the motes of light rising from them. Her attention started to shift as Bardiche came down, but there simply wasn’t time for her to move far.

The force of the blow drove the Blade to her knees, and Bardiche’s blade carved a burnt scar clean across the back of her shoulders, barely an inch under the base of her neck. Not where Fate had been aiming, but it was good enough. She touched down with one foot, shattering the already-broken road still further and throwing up sparks, and shot off horizontally away from the natives. A barked warning from Arf had her dodge to one side just as the chainsword came down, splitting the street in a long gouge that vomited fire.

Turning a quick left to break line of sight, she glanced back at the Blade. Who hadn’t moved from her position. She was turning back to the natives, holding up the Book again. Letting Fate get away. Narrowing her eyes, Fate readied a brace of Plasma Lancers and darted up to rooftop height for another pass. One after another she fired through the gaps between buildings, forcing the Blade to break off her draining again to parry.

Something was wrong. She didn’t look angry as she stood there among the shattered stone and flames, even with a painful wound across her back. She looked... familiar somehow. Something about her expression. Or... not her expression, but her attitude. The way she held herself and allowed Fate to distract her so easily. The shots were the first half of a distraction, meant just to occupy half of her attention... and yet she’d broken off draining entirely to stop them.

Memory struck as Fate dropped back behind a row of buildings to avoid the curving arrows that came in response to her shots. She knew that response because she’d experienced it before; personally. It was relief. Relief at someone interrupting a job she didn’t want to do, but was doing anyway. Because Alicia needed her to.

 _‘Who are you doing this for?’_ she sent, not slowing down in the slightest. The Blade had noticed her return and was trying to track her, the Book tucked into a hip pouch. But Fate was small and fast and behind a row of buildings; circling like a predator at least twenty degrees further around from where the knight was looking.

Precia had said that the Wolkenritter were mindless programmes. That they acted like people, but weren’t. And yet... they hadn’t killed anyone. Even when they had been fighting against Alicia’s summoned creature, the Blade had attacked it – and not the summoner.

Could it be?

 _‘Are they hurt?’_ she tried. _‘Is your master trying to save them?’_

 _‘Go away, little girl.’_ The Blade’s voice was startlingly human for the monster she was portrayed as – deep for a woman, but not unusual at all. And something in it told Fate she was on the right track. Now, what had Nanoha done when facing her...?

 _‘My name is Fate Testarossa!’_ she called, and flung an Arc Saber to force the Blade further from her victims. She parried, and a Lightning Bind sprung out to wrap around her sword, but somehow she pulled it free before the yellow rings could close on it. _‘Tell me why you’re fighting and maybe we won’t have to! I won’t let you hurt these people like this!’_

 _‘No,’_ the Blade replied bluntly, nocking another set of arrows to the bow her Device had become and taking aim. That... was not what Fate had been hoping for. But on the other hand, she _was_ talking back.

 _‘At least tell me your name,’_ she demanded. _‘I was doing something like this not long ago. Hurting people and fighting to save someone I cared about!’_

That seemed to make the Blade hesitate, from the little Fate could see through her blurred surrounding. The arrow was getting a little too accurate in tracking her, though, so she gave up on getting a better look in favour of breaking off her circling and getting some more distance.

 _‘It’s Signum,’_ the low voice replied. _‘Did you? Save them?’_

... uh.

 _‘... yes,’_ Fate admitted reluctantly. _‘But only because I explained what I was doing and why!’_

 _‘Then we’ll manage.’_ A bolt of fire punched through the building in front of Fate, and she swerved to avoid it, dropping back down until she was barely a foot above the street.

 _‘Fate,’_ Arf warned as a shimmering orange faceted shield sprung up around her. _‘I don’t think she’s going to listen.’_

 _‘You don’t want to be doing this!’_ Fate yelled as doors and windows blurred past her on both sides. She kinked right at a fork in the road, then darted down the right hand side of a split in the road and rose to avoid an improvised barricade. The limp bodies behind it showed how little it had helped against an opponent that could fly with ease. _‘I can tell! You-’_

A roar of fire. The whistling hiss of air parting before a blade. Fate twisted parallel to the ground, rolling onto her back and bringing her scythe across and down as she pulled her legs up to her chest. The chain-sword barely missed her toes, and she continued the motion into a backward roll. Her feet came down onto the ground, and she braced her Jacket’s movement-enhancing underlayer. That high collar was about to come in useful.

Whatever the Blade – Signum – had been expecting, it apparently wasn’t for her target to change direction a hundred and eighty degrees inside a single bodylength. Fate grunted at the g-force that the sudden shift in acceleration put on her and her vision dimmed, but with one quick roll and a Blitz Action, she was now headed back the way she'd come. Behind her, she heard the street split as the momentum transfer kicked up a spray of debris from the surface of the street she’d come down on.

 _‘Bardiche.’_ she ordered. _‘Glaive form, and increase cycle to 20%’_ About equal to a cartridge. Signum had apparently decided that she wasn’t going to be able to drain anyone while Fate was harassing her. That was fine. All Fate had to do now was keep her distracted.

[Yes sir,] Bardiche agreed, and the energy blade vanished. The slots in the cylinder below the glaive head opened, and a vivid red light began to glow within. The red bled out into the yellow of her polearm’s blade, forming a thunderbolt-like pattern. It was the same colour-shifting as Raising Heart’s, Fate thought absently. Though hers had further to go. She let the shaft align naturally with her body as she blew past Signum’s position on a rooftop, pointing straight down behind her with her feet on either side of it. Yellow darts began to form in a glowing array behind her, and her lips quirked up in a tiny smile.

She couldn’t say she wasn’t going to enjoy fighting the Blade on her terms. Just a little bit.

Signum didn’t hesitate to leap into pursuit. She was every bit as fast as Fate had expected, and surrounded herself with a glowing purple aura that deflected away the steady stream of Plasma Lancers Fate kept trained on her. The two of them went airborne, Fate trailing a stream of shooting spells like the tail of a comet, which swung and curved to follow Signum as she flew. Her chainsword retracted down into the shorter, faster blade and she began to dodge and swerve, trying to cut Fate off. But this time Fate wasn’t trapped. This time, she had full freedom of movement.

 _‘Ready, Arf?’_ she whispered.

_‘When you are.’_

She dived.

The looming industrial district rose up around her, and she threw herself from side to side, swerving around smokestacks as purple arrows sought her out. Orange chains snaked out to wrap around the chimneys as she passed them, fading into invisibility even as they sent out links to the others nearby. Fate grinned. Her familiar might not be at Vesta’s level with illusions, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t learn a few tricks.

Swinging round the last column of black smoke, Fate dived back towards her enemy. She’d hit one of the traps and was snarled in it; the chains entangling her and leaving her strung between two towers with her arms spread wide. Fate blitzed past, glaive out to deliver another high-speed blow.

And then Signum wasn’t there anymore. Fate didn’t see exactly what she did, but the boot that slammed home into her lower back got the message across. Her dive turned into an uncontrolled tumble and she crashed through the roof below her. Silently she thanked her undersuit which turned a stunning impact into a mere slap.

Signum was right behind her as she sought to press her advantage. Her sword came down wrapped in flickering purple light. An orange Round Shield smashed up and _through_ it, snuffing the flames out like a light, and forcing the blow to one side. In the instant before she leapt away, Fate thought she saw shock on the construct’s face.

They were on a factory floor now. Not a sleek Myedoan production line, though. No, this was primitive and brutish. Vast machines of grease-smeared metal loomed around her, engraved with carved markings in overlapping pentagons. Presses, shears, lathes and moulds all stood silent in the shadowy light of the huge hall, lit only by the dim light filtering through the window and the hole in the roof. Peeking through a gap in one of the larger belt drives at the Blade, Fate began to panic. Out in the open she had been free to manoeuvre, but here she was trapped in a room full of metal with her enemy.

... on the other hand... she was trapped in a room full of metal with her enemy.

“Plasma Net!” she yelled, and brought Bardiche forward in a hasty thrust to meet the wheel she was hiding behind. Golden lightning haloed in red exploded out from the point of contact, crawling across the surface and arcing out to the machines beside it. And the machines beside them. And the machines beside them.

Within moments, the room was lit up by blinding bolts of lightning pulsing back and forth between the machines; discharging in random showers of sparks and arcs of current. Caught in the centre of it all, Signum knelt with her chainsword coiled around her. The bolts were hitting it, crackling along the metal in actinic zigzagging lines, but none were getting through to touch her.

 _‘If you’ve really been in my position,’_ she called, unable to see Fate as she floated unharmed through the chaos; bolts skittering around her harmlessly thanks to a conversion spell. _‘Then you should know that you won’t stop me by talking. The only outcome that I’ll accept...’_

[Fliegender Drachenblitz!]

 _‘Is her safety!’_ she finished in a roar, and the room exploded. Fate boosted through a window and across the yard outside, fast-cast shields flaring orange and yellow around her. She got no further before the shockwave caught up to her and tossed her into another building.

This one was hot. Very, very hot. Huge metal vats twice her height practically glowed under furnace lids, and the hellish light that escaped them was orange-red and sulphurous. Fate sniffed the air and winced, her eyes watering. Of course. A whole factory floor full of metal-working equipment. This was a steel foundry.

And she’d just found the steel ladles. There were at least a dozen huge crucibles in the room, each mounted on massive swings that hung from the ceiling and hinged so their contents could be poured. Gears controlled the tipping hinges, with hand cranks to lock them in position and tilt them slowly.

Fate took in the scene in seconds, fully aware of her precious seconds of lead time ticking away. _‘Bardiche, reduce to 5%. Arf, barrier on the floor for the steel.’_

Arf didn’t question. She just cast. The floor under the nearest vat’s lip turned orange just as Fate shot the control gear off. Instead of a slow and controlled tilt, the entire crucible tipped wildly sideways, sending what had to be a dozen tonnes of metal out in a torrent. The barrier curved up at the edges to keep it from splashing, and the churning mass of liquid steel washed up the side and turned back towards the wall that Fate had come in through.

 _‘Take this!’_ yelled Arf, and the barrier jerked forwards like a whipped sheet. A wave of molten steel went airborne just as the Blade’s mana signature approached, crashing into the windows and wall like a scalding tsunami.

Silence fell, and Fate reflexively readied a Plasma Barret. The yellow blades hung in their firing rings around her, turning to follow her gaze as she scanned the far wall.

 _‘Did we get her?’_ Arf panted.

 _‘No.’_ Signum’s signature had been close, but not close enough to be caught by the steel that had spilled through the windows. Now she was hovering just outside. Waiting to see what Fate would do next. _‘Get another one ready, though,’_ Fate added. _‘Under the next vat.’_ She licked her lips nervously. The next move was hers. If she just stayed in here, Signum could simply leave to drain more victims, forcing her to abandon her position here.

_‘Fate?’_

_‘What?’_

Arf sounded worried. _‘The Breaker’s busy with the big spear guy, right? And I saw a draining sigil that must’ve been the Healer. I’ve been scanning the area, and I can pick up both of them. And the Blade’s just outside.’_

Eleven ladles left, but only four were full. Signum would be expecting her to go through the roof or the back wall; what about the adjacent ones? It would take her five seconds or so to charge up a bombardment spell with the Jewel Seed’s help; could Arf manage another steel wave if the Blade charged her halfway through? Fate’s mind raced through possibilities. _‘Is there a point to this?’_ she snapped.

_‘Yeah. Those are the only mages I can sense, bar us. The spear guy from the TSAB and three Cloud Knights.’_

Fate was busy juggling the mental load of half a dozen potential plans, tracking the Blade’s mana emissions, maintaining a shooting spell on a hair trigger and keeping a wary eye on the draw cycle of her Device. So perhaps she could be forgiven for the wordless sound of confusion she made before Arf spelled it out for her.

_‘So where’s the fourth one?’_

...

“Mama. I’m not sure when you’ll get this, but I’m okay as of sending it. We’ve been looking for the Wolkenritter who attacked you and Arisa and Suzuka. I can’t say too much in case this message is intercepted, but I need you to do me a favour...”

 _Click_. Momoko paused the message with a sigh and looked up at the hospital. The weather outside was grey, and although it wasn’t snowing right now the slush of the morning’s fall was still on the ground. “You’re sure you know who she’s talking about?” she asked, glancing over at the schoolgirls accompanying her.

Arisa shrugged. “Brown-haired girl in a wheelchair, pink-haired friend. I never actually talked to the wheelchair one, but I spoke to...” She paused, frowning. “Yoshida... Ch-something. Chihiro? No... uh... Chiko? Something like that. I spoke to her once or twice. She’s been there for ages, so it totally fits with Nanoha meeting her there last time.”

“She deserves a warning,” Suzuka put in. “If she’s magical, she’s at risk. Right?”

Momoko nodded absently, her mind more on her daughter than the girl she’d come to visit. She’d found the message on her Device after the TSAB had returned her home. From the timestamp, it had arrived not long before the battle, so it was no surprise that it offered no clue on where Nanoha had gone or what she was doing.

It still wasn’t comfortable; not knowing for sure.

The doctor at the front desk recognised Arisa, and seemed receptive enough to her claims of wanting to visit a friend she’d made during her stay. It was only when the name of that friend came up that a problem arose.

“Relapsed?” Momoko repeated as a cold pricking feeling ran down her spine. “When? How?”

The doctor looked uncomfortable at discussing details of a patient with strangers, but Arisa’s sincere surprise and worry won him over. “Yesterday,” he said reluctantly. “It may be nothing to worry about; you get ups and downs in treatment. This is probably just a temporary turn for the worse.”

“Can I see her, though?” Arisa asked, turning to look at Momoko in worry. The same thought was on both of their minds. A sudden, unexpected downturn in her condition, just as they were coming to warn her about the Wolkenritter? Had they been too late?

“I...” The doctor hesitated for a moment, but gave in to their obvious concern. “I suppose so, if she’s awake. Let me just find the room number for you.”

A few minutes later, they were on their way up. Chikaze – Arisa had grumbled that she’d been close – had been moved to the emergency ward after her sudden relapse, and visiting hours were nearly over. It wasn’t hard to find the right door, and they stepped inside quietly.

And then it all went wrong.

There was a man in the room. Not there for Chikaze, though he was talking to her in a friendly sort of way. The bed he was sitting next to held a brown-haired girl whose sickly pallor promised nothing good in her immediate future – far worse than Chikaze, who seemed weak and trembly but mostly functional. The protective way he hovered over his charge, all but holding her in his arms, was touching.

His identity was not. Because Momoko recognised this man. And so did the girls. Arisa gasped, Suzuka screamed, and his gaze snapped over to them. Recognition struck instantly and he vaulted the bed, putting himself between them and the girl. Momoko responded instinctively, sending out a desperate telepathic shout as she drew on her own power and sank into a more stable-

She was airborne for a second before colliding with the door. Ingrained muscle memory helped her tuck and roll with the impact as she fell to the floor, but her vision was full of stars and she could barely breathe. A high-pitched ringing filled her ears as her head swam muzzily. He must have... hit her. Gently. If the swordswoman was anything to go by; a serious attack would have sent her clean through the door. And probably put her back in a hospital bed to boot, if not a morgue.

Of course, ‘gentle’ was a relative term. By the time she finished gasping for breath and two pairs of hands helped pull her upright, the man was gone. So was the girl he’d been guarding. Yoshida, though, was still present, and looking terrified.

Why had he fled? He could easily have knocked her out... ah. But it wasn’t from her, was it? It was from her cry for help. From the chance that backup was coming. Which meant that her next step should be to make sure it was; as fast as possible. She pulled her Device out and set it to broadcast on the communication frequency Lindy had given her before sending her back to Earth. And, after a brief hesitation, on an open local channel.

If Nanoha was still in the area, she’d hear it.

 _‘This is Momoko Takamachi,’_ she sent, fast and urgent. She put everything she had into it. She might not be good for much with those things around to – repeatedly – beat her up, but she could at least be good for this! _‘I’ve sighted one of the Wolkenritter in Uminari City, along with...’_

A little girl.

 _‘... what might be their master,’_ she finished. _‘Come quickly!’_

Dropping the connection, she turned to the pink-haired girl sitting wide-eyed in bed, confused and afraid at the sudden outburst of violence.

“Yoshida-san?” she asked with a slight wheeze, and got a tentative nod. “My name is Momoko. I’m Nanoha’s mother – the girl in white who you met six months ago.”

Blank confusion. And then, as Chikaze’s eyes roamed over her face; a gradual wave of recognition. Momoko sighed in relief and winced, cradling her ribs. Shallow breaths, she reminded herself. Don’t try for deep ones while you’re still winded.

“There are some things you need to know, and others that I’d like to,” she said frankly. “Let’s trade.”

...

Silence hung like a guillotine in the comfortable office. Three pairs of eyes bored into one as Chrono stood in thought. Sat placidly behind the desk, Gil Graham showed no signs of concern. He might be the least dangerous person in the room, but Aria and Lotte were AAA-rank individually in their respective long and short range combat styles. The modifications to their war forms made them even more formidable, but with Lotte a bare metre from Chrono’s side and no cover between them, the fight would never reach that point. It would be over in seconds.

“The master,” Chrono said quietly. “It’s a 97er, isn’t it? Like Takamachi. That’s why the Wolkenritter haven’t been killing; they’re under orders not to.” He cocked his head. “A native-born mage who orders their knights to avoid killing when it gains them nothing... is that the sort of criminal who deserves to be eternally frozen?”

“It’s not about who is deserving,” Gil replied sadly. Chrono seemed calmer now. The anger he’d walked into the room with was gone, and the horror he’d shown at the truth of Aria and Lotte was absent. He’d come to a decision, more or less. Either he was looking for the last few reassurances that this was the best path, or he was waiting to strike at the best possible moment.

“They don’t deserve it,” Lotte said. Her voice was low, and utterly neutral. “But the people who will die the next time the Book rampages don’t deserve it either. It’s not the master’s fault. It’s the Book’s fault. They’re just another one of its victims. Better one than one thousand. Or one million. Or one billion.”

“If I could take the Book myself,” he said, raising his hand to quieten her, “and drain only those who volunteered, and willingly be sealed, I would. But the Bureau would never agree to force a civilian into such a plan. I’ve done all I can for the master. I’ve... I’ve tried to make their life as happy as possible. But in the end... the Book chose them. This was always going to happen, eventually. It was just a matter of how.”

Chrono’s eyes narrowed, but only for a moment. He dipped his chin in acknowledgement of the point and rubbed S2U’s cartridge mechanism thoughtfully with a thumb.

“Your plan is illegal,” he said. “And immoral, and unethical.” Lotte hissed and Aria bristled, but Gil raised a hand to let Chrono speak his piece. “If those were the only things wrong with it, it would still be wrong,” he continued. “But there’s another problem with it besides the sacrifice of an innocent. You’re talking about a prison impossible to escape from the inside. A perfect trap from which there is no escape.”

He took two paces to the edge of Gil’s desk and leaned forward, planting his hands and his Device on the aged wood to look the admiral in the eye. “But a spell like that still can’t ignore basic rules of magic. Even if it’s inescapable from within, releasing the Book from the outside would be possible, if not trivial. You could hide it, but no matter how deeply you bury it and no matter how well you guard it, there will always be people who will want to use it for their own selfish ends. It might lie for a decade or two – perhaps even a century. But it will escape again, and your work will have been in vain.”

“You’re too pessimistic,” Aria countered. “The Book of Dragon’s Fall. The _Ad Astra_. There are multiple high grade Lost Logia that the Saint Church have contained longer than the TSAB has existed.”

“And there are plenty that haven’t!” Chrono blazed. “There’s always some idiot who thinks that they’ll be different!”

“Containment works,” she insisted.

Chrono let out a bitter sigh. “No! Because let’s ignore the fact that you’re betraying everything the TSAB stands for...”

“The TSAB exists to keep people safe! I... I thought we taught you that!” Lotte shouted. Gil waved her down, and she sullenly stepped back, eyes glaring at Chrono’s throat with hurt betrayal.

“You are betraying everything the TSAB stands for and everything you taught me about that,” Chrono repeated. “And you’re wrong. Because the Mariage are here now. Your plan didn’t account for them, and they will follow the Book to the ends of the universe to get their hands on its power. They are not stupid! They are not mindless. They’re smart and not human. They don’t think things like ‘Oh, maybe we shouldn’t release this ancient superweapon’. They think they can use it as a battery. If we seal the Book away, they’ll scatter and search for it. We’ll never be able to be sure we’ve killed them all. And they’ll never stop looking.”

“You’re wrong!” Lotte made an angry grab for him that Chrono ducked away from, barely avoiding her hand. She didn’t follow him; placing herself protectively in front of the desk and practically spitting at him, hackles raised. “We can keep it secure enough that it will be safe for decades! And every decade means uncountable lives saved that it would have destroyed!”

Chrono didn’t flinch. “And you’d keep it where?” he asked rhetorically. “Somewhere secure enough and defended enough to fend off any assault. Nowhere else would be safe.” He paused. “The Bureau doesn’t have many places like that, and it can’t afford to build a new isolated facility. Are you comfortable with keeping the Book of Darkness, in its fully rampant state, trapped at a Lost Logia holding site?”

Gil’s eyes narrowed. That didn’t sound like the boy who had almost been like a son to him. Chrono had made his point – more than made it. Letting himself be drawn into debate like this, after he’d made his decision, wasn’t like him. Not when anyone could see that neither side was willing to be convinced. And he severely doubted Chrono truly believed that the Bureau wouldn’t build a facility to contain the Book. In fact, it was nonsense. Of course it would. It had done it for lesser threats than this. Yet he was still talking, dragging out the argument. Letting them speak.

Like Gil had let him speak, safe in the knowledge that his familiars were on their way.

“You’re stalling,” he accused, and Aria’s ears twitched. Her hands came up in a casting position, ready to meet whatever Chrono had planned. “What are you waiting for, Enforcer?”

Chrono held his gaze for a long moment, and Gil could see in his eyes the point at which he reached the end of whatever mental countdown he’d been tracking. With a sudden burst of speed, he swung S2U round and cast a barrier, just as Lotte jumped for him. Her hand came in; piercing claws of light aimed to break through his defence and snap his Device in half.

A flash, a deafening crack, and she was sent tumbling over the desk, barely missing her master.

Gil and Aria stared, stunned.

“Struggle Bind,” Chrono said, lowering the barrier and levelling S2U. Not at Lotte as she pulled herself to her feet, or at Aria, whose had a shooting spell ready. At Gil. “A powerful form of restraint magic that dispels any strong magic on the victim. I knew from the teleport logs that Aria and Lotte must be the Masked Men, so I had time to think. How to win against them?”

Aria snarled and fired, but the shot was weak; shattering against Chrono’s shield. A wave of his staff, and glowing ropes sprang from the walls and floor to wrap around them, forcing them to their knees. Gil gasped as something in his chest lurched painfully.

“The two of you taught me, after all,” Chrono continued. “I knew there was no way I could beat you directly. So as soon as I came in, I cast a set of privacy wards. And in them, I hid a variant of Struggle Bind. A mana-leech binding that would act as a subtle parasite, taking more and more from the victim’s Linker Core – but slowly enough that it wouldn’t be noticed. My Jacket was warded against it.”

He nodded at Gil. “But yours wasn’t. And you said it yourself. Aria and Lotte are power-hungry. All I had to do was wait until enough of your power was sapped that you couldn’t support them in combat. And keep them distracted and angry so they wouldn’t notice.”

Gil gritted his teeth. Now that he knew what to look for, he could feel the drain; a river of magic diverted from what normally went to his familiars. Not nearly enough to endanger their lives. But enough to weaken them extensively.

“And...” he grunted, “I suppose... the ward net also hid... a dormant binding?” He gestured at the glowing blue-white ropes holding them down. “Ready to trigger... when they attacked? Or when they were weak enough?”

Chrono dipped his head in acknowledgement. “Admiral Gil Graham, Aria Lieze, Lotte Lieze,” he said formally. “I hereby place you all under arrest. Your list of crimes includes, but is not limited to; misappropriation of TSAB funds, noncompliance with procedural rules, withholding critical information from superior officers, unlawful _experimentation_ on familiars, conspiracy to commit _murder_ , aiding an enemy in combat _against TSAB officers under your command_ , _deliberate activation of a restricted Lost Logia_...”

He appeared to realise he was shouting and broke off, breathing heavily. “And others to be determined at the time of your court martial,” he finished.

“I understand, and agree,” said Gil. “I would ask only two things.”

“I don’t negotiate with people like you,” Chrono snapped.

Gil laid Durandal down on the desk and pushed it towards Chrono, ignoring the boy’s words. He could see the hurt in his familiar’s eyes, but the pain in Chrono’s was just as strong. “Take this. Use it for whatever purposes you see fit. It’s better than your current Device, and... I suspect it might be needed. The Book _will_ go rampant within the next thirty six hours. Nothing can stop it now. The master’s name is Hayate Yagami. A...” he closed his eyes and hung his head. “A nine-year old girl located in Uminari City. I know,” he added quickly when Chrono’s eyes widened. “I know. If I could have spared her this...” He paused. “Lotte and Aria can give you the details – and help you fight when it goes rampant, if you let them. You’ll need every mage you can get.”

Chrono stared at him for a long moment, his hand curling into a fist again without his notice. Eventually, he stepped forward and picked up Durandal in a quick, clinical motion.

“Contact Admiral Harlaown,” he said flatly. “Make a full confession; admit to all your crimes. Ask _her_ if she’s comfortable letting your familiars fight beside us.”

He turned and walked to the door. “If she thinks they can work _with_ the Bureau and _against_ the Book, we’ll see,” he tossed over his shoulder, and stepped out.

Aria’s ears dropped as she looked at her master. “What do we do now?” she asked, doubt colouring her tone for the first time. Gil sighed.

“Now,” he said, “I suppose it’s time to come clean.”

...

Sweat dripped down Fate’s forehead from the oppressive heat of the smelting room. A faint wobble in the air marked the edge of her Barrier Jacket where it filtered the toxic smoke coming off the spilled steel into breathable air. She couldn’t stay here, even if she wanted to. She wasn’t foolish enough to think she was safe, despite the Blade’s apparent reluctance to enter. And if she did stay, nothing stopped the Cloud Knight from continuing the ravaging of the natives.

 _‘The person you were fighting for,’_ Signum said from outside. There was a newly thoughtful tone to her mental voice. _‘The summoner, yes? From the fight on UA-97. Your sister, at a guess.’_

Fate went cold with dread. But Signum continued. _‘She’s not here. Nor are any of the others you fought with on that day. You have no stake in this battle, beyond principle. Leave now and I won’t pursue you.’_

 _‘... you don’t want to hurt me,’_ guessed Fate. _‘If you can help it.’_

Admittedly, there had been some very near misses from that sword. But then, Fate had been fighting all out from the beginning.

 _‘I will if I must,’_ Signum said, and the flat control to it rung truer than Fate liked to admit. She knew that sentiment. Oh, did she know that sentiment.

But Nanoha had fought her. Not for a precious person. For a belief. Because she’d thought it was the right thing to do.

 _‘I can’t just let you hurt these people,’_ she replied sadly. _‘Even if I’m only fighting for principle... it’s not a principle I can give up on.’_ She took a breath. It might not be a principle she could hold as tightly as Nanoha did, but Nanoha believed in it. So Fate believed in it too.

A brief pause. Fate lined up her waiting Plasma Barret and raised Bardiche’s draw cycle back to 20%.

 _‘I see,’_ said Signum eventually, and there was a trace of sorrow in her voice. And perhaps a hint of respect. _‘Then as one knight to another-’_

Fate knew better than to wait for her to finish, and Arf knew her mistress well enough not to need a command. A wave of molten steel rushed forwards. A barrage of explosive shots went right.

Fate tucked her limbs in tight and sped left. Bringing Bardiche around to lead her way, she let Arf boost the field strength of her Barrier Jacket and expand it into a narrow cone around her. She punched through the wall with a soft ‘thunk’ and immediately doubled her speed, heading into a railyard adjacent to the steel foundry. The rails crisscrossed and fused together from dozens of berths to two lines leading out towards the edge of the city. Carts stood still and silent at their loading platforms; stacked high with crates.

 _‘Incoming!’_ warned Arf, and Fate darted to the side to avoid an arrow. She spun and brought Bardiche up to meet the swordblade that followed it, and traded half a dozen ringing blows, wincing with each one. The last deflection gave her some space and she threw herself back into flight, lying parallel to the ground to minimise her profile from behind and sending another stream of Plasma Lancers backward. Glancing down and backward, she caught a quick glimpse of Signum casting something that formed purple falcon-wings of light from her singed and scarred shoulderblades.

Then she was moving. Very, very quickly. Fate squeaked with fright and poured everything she had into speed. A resounding boom echoed out around her as she broke the sound barrier, and the rush of air around her became a roar. She stuck close to the line of the railway. That, at least, she could depend on to be clear of obstacles like buildings or barricades or tunnels...

... wait. Tunnels?

Her eyes widened as she realised what she was coming up on. In the close confines of a tunnel, her mobility would be crippled – Signum could simply fill the entire space with fire. And, she realised, there was someone waiting there for her. The Hound?

No. One of the Masked Men! It held up its hand in a salute as she frantically braked and strove for altitude. She was moving too fast to change her vector with a Blitz Action, but if she could just boost herself upwards enough, she could... well, she might smash into the wall that the tunnel went through. But at least she wouldn’t be trapped in a thousand-degree killzone.

_‘Fate! Behind you!’_

But braking had been its own mistake. Fate twisted, swung and cast. An orange shield went up behind the Arc Saber, but Signum cut through it and crashed into her shoulder-first. If not for Arf’s shield, she might well have knocked Fate out completely. As it was, every breath of air was forced out of Fate’s lungs as she went flying backwards into the tunnel, bouncing along the ground like a stone skipping over water and trailing sparks. She skidded to a halt and lay there for a moment, stunned.

Luckily, Arf wasn’t. Wriggling free from the backpack, she took her war form with a roar, standing protectively over her mistress’s body and conjuring a barrier around them. Her bent legs and bared fangs dared the Blade to approach.

Around her, the shadows whispered. Dark shapes peeled out of the black to surround them, but their attention wasn’t on Fate or Arf. It was on the hellish light approaching them from the end of the tunnel. A wave of fire preceded Signum as she approached; purple wings drawn in to fit within the narrow confines of the tunnel. Steel rails glowed red hot and stonework cracked and charred. Arf braced herself. All she had to do was hold out until Fate recovered.

Like a howling dragon, the Blade bore down on them.

And a volley of grey lances struck her in the back.

She stumbled, but reacted with uncanny speed to the sudden attack, spinning through ninety degrees to bring her assailant into view without exposing herself to an attack from the figures lurking in the gloom. The blank mask of the man who’d followed her in gave her pause only for a second, and she snapped out a bolt of fire towards him.

But there were dozens of them. The figures streamed past Fate and Arf, ignoring her in pursuit of a larger prize. Grey lances flashed out again and again and again, in a constant volley. The Blade’s sword spun and blurred to bat them aside, but the strike to the wound Fate had left on her was beginning to tell. As she twisted to blow a charging figure back towards the tunnel entrance, Arf could see through the cracked shell of her construct-body to the brilliant purple within. Her arms were moving slower as the mob moved in, and the same confined space she’d hoped to use against Fate was now working against her.

Three figures pounced. Three figures died; split head to crown in a blurred motion. They burst into chemical flame, and Arf heard her mistress gasp beneath her as she realised what they were. Not the Masked Men after all. Or at least not _those_ masked men, for all that they looked the same now.

Mariage.

“Clever...” Fate breathed as she floated back, keeping her polearm between her and her foes. “Were they helping her all along, waiting for this? Or did they just... see the ones helping her, and disguise themselves the same way?”

Another two Mariage fell. But one of them was close enough to splash the Blade’s legs as it fell apart, and she cried out. Whatever it was they turned into in death; it burnt hot enough to be dangerous even through armour. The Blade began to bring her sword around for a burst of fire that would fill the tunnel, but one of her attackers tackled her sword arm to stop the motion. In the time it took for her to kick it off and behead it, another dozen grey lances had struck her, the Mariage firing clean through their comrade as it fell back.

“They’re after the Book,” Fate whispered. The glowing tome on the Blade’s hip; flush with power. “If they get it...”

 _‘She can’t win, though,’_ Arf argued. _‘And... Fate. Neither can we. There are too many. And you’re hurt.’_

Fate closed her eyes. The shadowy figures were still coming past her. More were coming in through the tunnel mouth.

 _‘I’m sorry,’_ she called to the Blade, squeezing her eyes shut against the sight of them surrounding her. Like a swarm of army ants bringing down a tiger. _‘I really am. But I have to be there for my sister.’_

There was no response. Not verbally, at least. But as Fate gathered a shrinking Arf into her arms and turned to flee, she thought she felt a breath of understanding.

Tears fell as she left the roar of flame and battle behind.

...

The world was blurry. It was hard to breathe, and her eyes wouldn’t seem to open. Where was she? She’d been... she’d been having breakfast with her family. And then... something, and now she was here.

Where was here?

Soft. Soft was here. Soft sheets and... a familiar smell. Ah. Bed. This was her bedroom, and she was in bed.

Okay then. Unable to summon the energy to nod for real, Hayate gave a mental nod instead. She was at home, in bed, and she could feel a warm thing next to her that was probably one of her knights. Zafira, from the sound of it. Things were good.

Things were good?

No. Things were not good. She’d collapsed. Her family must be worried. Zafira was talking, and sounded scared. What was he saying? She tried to force her ears to listen, aware of a drifty numbness to her lower body that felt concerning. It wasn’t like the numbness of her legs just not responding. It felt... it felt more like the numbness of her body shutting down in self defence against how much it hurt.

_‘-out of there!’_

Oh, right. Talking. It was... Vita, talking. Well. Shouting. It was very hard to hear at first – not faint, but garbled, like it was behind a wall that messed the sound up. But something shifted lazily in the back of her head when Hayate strained to hear better; like blocks in her brain lifting up and slotting back into place. And then Vita’s voice was as clear as day. It sounded like she’d been crying. No, like she was crying right now.

 _‘The Mariage have one of the simulacra! They’ve raised reinforcements and they’re tracking it back to you; move! Signum’s dead and I’m wounded; we’re coming as fast as we can, but_ get Hayate out of there! _’_

... what?

Signum... what? No. That couldn’t... what was a ‘Mariage’, anyway? Why would Signum be dead?

What was happening?

“’fi?” she managed in a whisper. Strong hands stroked her hair as Zafira gathered her into his arms, and she managed to crack an eye open. He was wild-eyed, but his face was completely blank. Like the first time she’d seen him; a machine in the shape of a person.

“Come on, Hayate,” he murmured. His voice was still soft, at least. “We need to go.”

“B-” But Signum. Signum... who was dead. How? Why?

Movement. And then stillness. Hayate forced her neck to turn and see. They were in the kitchen, and the fuzzy blobs of red and green nearby sounded like Vita and Shamal. Vita was talking heatedly, her voice fading in and out.

“They came out of nowhere, Zaf... mobbed Signum while she was fighting that... barely made it back ahead of them. Didn’t see Signum as she went down... after the Book, where is it?”

“Here.”

Something heavy and oblong was gently placed against her chest. Her arms went round it automatically, with strength she hadn’t known she possessed. And, from their lack of response as she tried to move them again, probably hadn’t. A hand stroked her hair gently. Shamal?

“... be safe...” she was saying, but Hayate couldn’t make out much more. “... away from... promise.”

“They’re here!”

Vita again. Hayate levered an eye open. She was looking outside the house...

... where there were shapes. Dark figures clustered in the back yard, heedless of the heavy rain. Surrounding the house. Rustling as they moved in. The door banged open, and the world went white with the painful light of spellfire. She felt Zafira move again, much faster, and several dull impacts travelled up his arms and into her. She bit her lip so as not to cry out as a cold hand closed painfully around her arm and pulled.

And then there was heat and sound and fury.

Squinting against the light, Hayate cracked her eyes open. The entire back wall of the house was gone. The yard burned fiercely, lighting up the night like day, but nowhere did it burn more fiercely than the figure at its centre. She wore the armour of a samurai; lamellar steel and banded mail covering every inch of her. A fearsome war mask hid her face, and the flames burnt so hot around her that the rain hissed into steam a foot above her head. Her sword was incandescent; as bright as a sliver of the sun that spun and struck in blinding blurs to turn back the dark tide.

Signum, Hayate’s lips moved soundlessly.

Vita was there as well, an iron knight in plate armour and heavy boots dispensing brutal swings of her hammer. Shamal’s heavy robes and thick gloves were in front of them, behind a wall of sea-green light. She was safe in Zafira’s arms.

... so why was Zafira turning? Why was he running away?

And then Hayate saw what she’d missed at first glance. The glorious knight of fire and sunlight was wounded. Cracks rent the surface of her armour in a dozen places – deep wounds that bled purple motes of light. A hole went clean through her chest where her heart should be, and her armour was scorched and charred. Vita was wielding her hammer with her one hand, her left arm cradled by her side and ending at the wrist. Shamal was limping, backing away from the wall she’d cast and turning to look at Zafira.

Their features. They were like china dolls. Cracking and peeling, revealing only magic underneath. Magic which was flowing back to Hayate. Back to the book in her arms.

And still there were more dark creatures. They felt no pain. They felt no fear. Where one fell, another used the opening. They threw themselves at her knights, bursting into sour-burning liquid as they died that burnt their killers further.

“Take her! Go!” Shamal shouted. “Get her away from here!”

They fled. Over her shoulder, Hayate saw a figure slash a bladed arm across Vita’s throat, heedless of the hammer that had taken two of its other limbs. Signum’s sword whirled, felling a dozen of the things in a heartbeat before lashing out with a circle of fire. But they scattered away from her wide-area spells and drew back in like a swarm to take advantage of the gaps it made in her defence. One of the creatures raised an arm like a cannon, and fired at her with an echoing crack. Somehow, impossibly, she turned the projectile back at it.

A dozen grey lances impaled her in the same instant.

Signum toppled backwards. Her arms spasmed, still trying to stab at her countless foes.

Shamal’s wall bulged and grew into a green bubble that enveloped the house and hardened opaque. _‘Go!’_ she called again. _‘I’ll hold them back as long as I can!’_

Wide-eyed, sick with horror, Hayate tried to convince herself she was dreaming. But she could feel the cold rain soaking her to the bone. She could hear the wind whistling past as Zafira carried her away.

She could see over Zafira’s shoulder as the bubble flickered, cracks spreading through it from top to bottom, and then shattered into nothing. Signum... Vita... Shamal. They were... they couldn’t be... this had to be a nightmare, it _had_ to be...

“Do not fear, mistress.”

The voice echoed inside her head, and there was power behind it unlike anything Hayate had ever felt. It was warm, and gentle, and achingly sad. It was strong, and reassuring, and fiercely protective. It knew about her pain, and it knew about her fear.

“I will protect you. Against all things that threaten you.”

And it was her. Her own voice. Speaking words she hadn’t said.

“Rest now, mistress. Your enemies are near. I will destroy them for you.”

The last thing Hayate felt was the sensation of falling, and the sight of Zafira dissolving into a cloud of white motes with a look of horror as the dark figures caught up. But she never hit the ground. The girl’s body pulsed from within, and the tome she cradled pulsed with it, like a heartbeat. A black dome expanded out from her, pushing back the Mariage inexorably as she floated upright in the air.

The world around her froze, ice flashing out over the surfaces and creeping over the mute blandness of the Mariage. Like animals faced with a glass door, they clawed at the dome.

Hayate’s hair lengthened as the colour faded from it, turning as white as the falling snow. Her clothes rippled and changed into a black coat lined with gold over an ancient dress bedecked with embroidered Belkan sigils – both casting glyphs and the cross emblem of the Book itself. Red lines bloomed on her skin, tracing diagonally across her cheeks and down her arms. On her back, a black mass swelled and then burst out into four great wings, whose inky feathers were drawn into the barrier around her.

But her face... ah, her face didn’t change. It aged, yes, as she gained in height and stature. But the figure that stood tall on the snow-covered ground, lit by the light of a burning building, was a twin of the woman Hayate would have one day become. Tears trickled down the newly birthed construct’s cheeks as she rose, surrounded on all sides by the Mariage as they slashed and shot in vain at her barrier.

Her eyes opened; hurt and hostile and bloody crimson.

And the Book of Darkness began her terrible work.

...


	11. Chapter Ten

[u]Power Games[/u] 

[b]Chapter Ten[/b] 

_‘This is Momoko Takamachi! I’ve sighted one of the Wolkenritter in Uminari City, along with... what might be their master. Come quickly!’_

Hovering over Unimari City’s grey skyline, Nanoha gasped. On arriving it hadn’t taken her long to realise that the Wolkenritter were not attacking her home city. That had left the question of what to do next. Should she move onto another planet, or wait here in case they were just delaying their strike?

Now she didn’t have to worry about that anymore. Her mother was calling for help! And she’d found the Book’s master? Oh, this was bad; very bad.

_‘Mama!’_ she called. Her stomach felt like it was sinking faster than the slushy rain falling all around her. _‘Where are you? Are you alright?’_

_‘Nanoha? I’m... I’m fine, dear.’_

That was a lie. Nanoha knew that tone inside out – literally; she’d heard it before in her own voice more than enough times to recognise it. Her mother sounded strained. Hurt.

_‘I’m at the hospital – come quickly! I think... there’s someone here you need to talk to. You and the Bureau.’_

Nanoha scowled as she dived. Whatever had hurt her mother was going to _regret_ it. “Vesta,” she ordered, and felt herself ripple into invisibility as she came down on the hospital and homed in on the source of her mother’s messages, Raising Heart levelled through the window at the...

... small, pink-haired girl in bed, who was looking wide-eyed and decidedly tousled. Her bedgown was crumpled and creased and her short hair stuck up in fuzzy clumps. Arisa and Suzuka were supporting Momoko, who was sitting on a second bed that had an empty wheelchair parked next to it. Her mother’s face was smudged and her hair hung down in front of her eyes. One hand was hovering around her chest in a way that spelt “winded” and possibly “bruised ribs”. Nanoha knew _that_ feeling, too. Intimately.

She sheepishly lowered Raising Heart and knocked on the window. Vesta dropped the illusion down to a half-sheath, keeping them cloaked from outside observers but visible to the room’s occupants. Four heads turned to her; two of them startled. The pink-haired girl didn’t seem too surprised, for some reason.

... wait. Nanoha recognised that hair. And that face.

Ooohhhhh.

Arisa recovered first, and hurried over to open the window, which took quite a bit of tugging and eventually a covert underlayer-boosted yank from Nanoha, since the hospital windows weren’t designed to open wide enough to fit a person through.

Oh well. They’d probably be able to fix it.

Once inside, Vesta leapt out and things became a cacophony of voices for a moment.

“Mama! Are you okay, did the master...”

“... have you _been_ , Nanoha? What are you doing here; what are you-”

“... and is that _Vesta?_ I thought you said...”

_‘... because if he was here we can track him down and Mistress can...’_

“Enough!” shouted Momoko, and wheezed for a moment in the sudden quiet. The cold air blew in through the damaged window, carrying sleet. “En... thank you. No, dear, I’m alright, really.” She coughed a couple of times, wincing. “I think... for now... our questions to you should probably wait.” She threw a severe look at Arisa and Suzuka, who were brimming with mutinous tension and clearly set on an interrogation. “We need to... to... I’m sorry about this... to tell you. What we’ve found.”

She motioned towards the pink-haired girl, who was looking at Nanoha fiercely.

“... I know you,” the girl said slowly. “You were... you were one of the girls fighting. You healed me.” She paused, considering this. “You weren’t very good at it,” she added. “Shamal is better. Also, you broke the hospital.”

Nanoha had the good grace to look sheepish. “I’m sorry. Uh. So... wait. Did the master attack you? I told Mama about you and that you were at risk...” She glanced at Momoko, worried. “Was I too late?”

Awkward silence fell. The pink-haired girl looked confused. “What’s going on?” she demanded. “You showed up, and Zafira ran off with Hayate, and you know about the knights somehow, and then _she_ showed up again... who are you all?” She paused again. “Except you,” she nodded at Arisa. “I know you. Vaguely.”

Momoko nodded. “I think... I think at the moment I know more than anyone else. So.” She turned to the bedridden girl. “Your friend. Hayate? Is she the master of the Wolkenritter? And you are?”

Nanoha drew a sharp breath, and paled. On her shoulder, Vesta’s ears flattened against her skull. A _girl?_ Not some... some terrible person who had set monsters on her friends and family, but someone her own age? And... wait, she realised, glancing at the wheelchair beside the empty bed. Did she mean the _wheelchair girl?_ But... why would she... _how_ would she...?

“... I’m Chikaze Yoshida. And yes...” Chikaze said cautiously, drawing the word out. “I mean, she doesn’t like them calling her that, but... why? How do you know that, anyway?”

Nanoha winced. Oh, this was not going to be easy. “They’ve...” she began.

“They’ve been attacking people,” Arisa said bluntly. “Me. And Suzuka. And Momoko-san.” She nodded at the older woman. “They want a lot of magic for something. Nanoha’s been fighting them.”

Nanoha stared at her, and she bristled. “What?” she snapped. “I’m not _stupid_ , it’s obvious!”

Chikaze ignored the bickering. “I don’t believe you!” she said heatedly, her voice rising. “You’re lying, you...”

“Raising Heart; play Wolkenritter logs.”

[Alright, my master. Selecting files.]

A window formed above Raising Heart and began to play, cutting off the rest of Chikaze’s objections.

_[Tödlicher Schlag!] barked Vita’s Device as she shot forward, pulsing an angry red._

_“If you find yourself in facing a woman with pink hair who uses a sword...” said Momoko, her face drawn and pale, faint burn marks on her arms, “don’t try to fight her. Just run. Please.” A brief flicker. “... she came out of nowhere, while I was closing up the bakery... her sword caught fire and she cut my broom in half.”_

_“Rrrgh..._ enough! _” shouted Vita, bringing her hammer round to strike a ball of red-white light and engulf the screen in a blinding roar of sound and fury._

_In the distance, the tiny figure of Momoko sent half dozen shooting spells at Signum, only for the swordswoman to blur past them and bring her down with a single, brutal punch._

_On a street far below the camera, Zafira advanced on Fate as she hung immobile in a trap of white magic..._

“Stop it!” shouted Chikaze. “Stop it stop it stop it! Hayate would _never!_ Never ever ever! She _told_ them they didn’t have to fight anymore, she _told_ them they weren’t going to hurt anyone, I was _there!_ ” There were tears in her eyes, and Nanoha quickly shut the screen down, feeling guilty.

“... well,” said Suzuka, folding her hands in her lap to stop them from shaking. “It looks like they didn’t listen. Why not?”

Momoko frowned. “That is a good question, yes. Why are they doing this? Arisa, you said they wanted magic – and I suppose that’s what they’ve been taking from people – but what for?”

“Precia-” Nanoha started, and cut off abruptly. After a moment she swallowed and started again. “Precia said... they weren’t people, just... like machines. They gather mana for the Book...”

She trailed off, looking at Chikaze uncertainly. “I... thought she was right,” she added. “At first. She usually is, so... I didn’t think she might be wrong. But you...”

“They’re not machines, they’re _people_ ,” Chikaze insisted fiercely, dragging a sleeve across her eyes. “I’ve known them for _months!_ Hayate lives with them, they were all weird at the start but now they’re... they’re my friends and they... they...”

Her eyes widened, her mouth fell open a little and Nanoha could almost see the chill go up her spine. “They said... she was getting worse,” she said in a small voice. “They thought I couldn’t hear but Shamal was worried and they said she’s been...” She gulped. “Her legs are... paralysed, sort of, and she’s ill and the doctors don’t know why and it’s... it’s been getting worse.”

_‘You think they decided to do it on their own,’_ Vesta said. _‘To save her.’_

Nanoha flinched. Visibly.

_‘Mistress...’_

“... Nanoha?” Momoko asked softly. “Is something...”

“We need to help her!” Nanoha said loudly, talking over her mother. “If she’s ill and it’s not her fault and they’re just trying to save her life – if they’re not just evil robot things, then we can talk to them. We _need_ to talk to them, before this ends in a horrible fight and people get hurt for no reason. Where are they, where will she be?”

_‘Mistress,’_ Vesta repeated, more urgently. _‘Do you feel that?’_ The lights in the room flickered as she spoke.

“... feel what?”

_‘That magic output. From that way.’_

All heads turned to the direction Vesta was looking; off at an angle that went narrowly past the window. Nanoha half-closed her eyes. Yes. There _was_ magic being used in that direction. Quite... quite a lot of magic, actually. Enough to be a battle. Oh no, had the Wolkenritter started their attack here after all?

“They... there,” Chikaze stuttered.

“Huh?” Nanoha looked at her, confused.

“Where... where Hayate lives. Where they’ll be.” Chikaze’s face was pale. “It’s there. It’s that way. That’s... what is that?!”

The power died – not just to the hospital, but to the entire street visible outside. Nanoha barely had time to turn and see what she was pointing at through the window.

Then the wall of solid darkness engulfed them all.

... 

The humid heat of Jail’s jungle base. The bitter cold of Akkamar. The rain-soaked streets of Uminari. Two severe climate transitions within an hour was a dizzying experience and the mana expenditure left her with a headache. Right now, though, Fate had more important things to worry about.

The teleport trace that the Wolkenritter had left wasn’t up to their usual standards of stealth. Not surprising, given how damaged they’d been. The hordes of Mariage going the same way had only made it easier to follow. She emerged on a rooftop in Uminari City. Unfortunately, the ease of following the trace came at the price of precision. There were no obvious signs of a fight going on anywhere near her. She must have come out away from the exact destination the Wolkenritter had been aiming for.

“Bardiche,” she began. The rain pattered down against her barrier jacket, running off it like glass. “Scan the area for-”

_‘Fate!’_

Arf’s warning came only an instant before a looming presence filled the space at her side. She didn’t even have to look up – and up, and up – to see who it was.

“Testarossa,” rumbled the TSAB spearman. The gravel on the roof shifted under his weight. Fate tensed. He didn’t look too worse for wear from his fight with the Breaker, and at this range she was doomed if he attacked.

“The Book and the Mariage are the biggest threats here,” he said instead. “You should evacuate.”

“No.” The refusal was instinctive. She might have abandoned Signum rather than fight a hopeless battle, but this was Nanoha’s home.

The spearman nodded as if he’d expected that. “Truce, then. For now.”

Fate narrowed her eyes, but nodded cautiously. Attacking him wouldn’t gain her anything, and he was right. They had bigger problems. “Truce,” she agreed.

_‘Captain Grangeitz! Testarossa!’_

... and then brought Bardiche up again, wheeling around to face the incoming signatures. Two figures her own size were approaching; one the Enforcer boy with what looked like a new Device, the other...

_‘No no no no no! Fate! We’re outnumbered three to two, don’t!’_

Her Plasma Lancer slammed home into a barrier that appeared in front of her, separating Fate from the blonde-haired boy in the green-tan Barrier Jacket. The orange pane fractured at the force behind the shot; splinters spreading through for a moment, and she prepared another pair. The first would punch through, and the second...

Something in her Barrier Jacket shifted, and a pair of hands clamped over her eyes and wrist, pulling her backwards into a generously endowed chest and pinning her there.

“Nooooo trying to kill the ferret kid when big scary spearman is right here!” Arf sang. “None! Not at all! I forbid it! You’re gonna get us _killed_ if you try, Fate, you know that!”

“He hurt Alicia!”

Fate thrashed, struggled and managed to land a glancing backward kick on Arf’s shin, but the wolf-familiar was wise to her moves and had a firm grip on her. _‘If you keep trying to fight they’ll arrest us!’_ she hissed in desperation. _‘We can’t beat all three of them, how will you help Alicia then?’_

It was a dirty move. But an effective one. Fate froze for a moment before going begrudgingly limp. Arf held on a moment longer to be sure it wasn’t a ploy, then released her. The three TSAB mages were watching intently, ready for any hint of movement. It galled her to let the attack on Alicia go, but she collapsed Bardiche regardless and settled for training a poisonous glare on Scrya.

“... right,” said Chrono after meeting Grangeitz’s eyes for a long moment. “Look, if you’re not intending to help, just leave. Now. The Book will start rampaging soon – very soon – and we might, if we all work together, just barely manage to stop it. I know who the master is, and I think I have the outline of a plan. But it won’t work if we’re fighting on two fronts. You’re angry, but I don’t think you want to sacrifice a city for whatever grudge you have. Especially not this city.”

Fate’s glare didn’t waver. Yuuno met it squarely, and spread his hands towards the city around them.

She broke first.

“... fine,” she muttered, looking away. “Nanoha is here too. We should find her first. And then you need to explain this ‘outline of a plan’.”

Yuuno interrupted before Chrono could reply. “I think we have bigger problems than finding Nanoha,” he said urgently, pointing past Fate and Grangeitz, over the rooftops at the end of the street. “We’re too late.”

Six or seven blocks away, an inky dome was rising over the city; expanding out with the speed and implacable force of a starship blast. There was no point trying to run. Even as they registered it, the leading edge engulfed half the distance between them.

“Barrier,” managed Yuuno.

“Brace for field impact!” called Zest. A shimmering network of green formed in front of them, and Fate drew Bardiche again. Her knuckles whitened around its grip.

And for the second time in as many minutes, the world went black.

... 

Within a normal barrier, the world was a muted reflection of realspace. Colour was dimmed. Weather was absent. Fine detail was blurred and distorted. The rain hung in the air, unmoving. The sky had a purplish tinge from the proximity to the Dimensional Sea, and an eerie silence dominated the area as the usual sounds of the environment ceased.

This was no normal barrier.

The sky was pitch black, and glistened like liquid ink. Some sourceless illumination cast the world in stark edges and washed-out shadows, but the light it offered was a cold one that sucked the pallor from the cheeks of Nanoha’s friends and tinted them in ghostly shades. She couldn’t tell where the heavy weight to the air was coming from until she took her mother by the hand and tried to teleport out through the barrier wall.

The sharp lance of pain she got back drew a scream from her. Anti-teleport countermeasures, then. Woven right into the fabric of the barrier. It wasn’t just hardened, it would _attack_ anything that tried to breach it.

_‘Mistress! Are you okay?’_

“No,” she groaned. “Ow, ow, _ow_. Ow. Ow.” Clutching at her head, she waited for the daggers that were stabbing through her temples to subside to a level she could think through. “Okay. Not... not going to be able to teleport you out, Mama.”

Momoko hugged her. “That’s fine. That doesn’t matter, Nanoha, are you alright? Are you hurt?” She stroked her daughter’s hair gently; careful not to jar her. Nanoha nodded.

“I’m... fine. But... you’re not. You’re all in danger. You need to get out of here!”

“Get out of what? What is this?” Momoko looked around, taking in the night-drenched world. “Has... has the Book of Darkness activated?”

_‘... yes,’_ Vesta admitted, when Nanoha didn’t seem willing to answer. _‘Dunno why it’s not tearing the city up yet, but this can’t be from anything else.’_

Momoko was silent for an agonisingly long time. She squeezed her eyes shut, and her face flickered through fear, anger and naked pain.

“Then go,” she said quietly.

A beat of uncomprehending silence filled the room.

“ _What?_ ” asked Arisa incredulously. “Go? Go _where?_ ”

“To fight it,” Momoko answered. Her voice was calm, but Nanoha could read the lines of impossible tension in her jaw and the way her hands fisted in her dress. “That’s what you’re intending once we’re safe, isn’t it? But I don’t think you have time for that. If it’s active, it’s active now. We’ll be fine here. It doesn’t seem to be close by. So that means you need to go now.”

“But...” Nanoha stuttered. “What about...”

“You want her to... to go out there and fight?” Suzuka said, her eyes wide. “To put herself in danger?”

“Of course I don’t!” Momoko snapped, glaring at her. Her face softened as she turned back to Nanoha. “Of course I don’t. Oh, darling. I wish... I wish I could wrap you up and keep you safe from this. But I can’t. If I was better at magic than you, I could be the one fighting it and you could stay here and keep people safe – but I’m not. And you’re going to fight it whatever I say.” She smiled sadly. “If we could get out of here, right now, could you look me in the eye and say you would come with us, to safety?”

Nanoha hesitated. And hung her head.

“We have to go,” she explained miserably. Vesta’s tail lashed as she floated herself back up onto her mistress’s shoulder for support. “If the Book is going to rampage, we need to stop it. The TSAB won’t be able to handle it on their own; we’re a big chunk of firepower that can help...”

Momoko pulled them both into an embrace. “I know,” she said, her voice cracking. “I know that, and I still want to stop you from going. But I can’t.” She sniffed, and ran a hand through Nanoha’s hair. “You’ve grown up so _fast_. Already too headstrong for your poor mother to... to be able to ground you.” She placed a gentle kiss on Nanoha’s forehead, and then on Vesta’s. “We’ll be safe,” she promised. “I’ll call your father; he’s probably in here as well. But Nanoha – you be safe too. Understand?”

Nanoha nodded. “I promise, Mama. I’ll try.”

Arisa pulled her into a rough hug as soon as Momoko let go of her. “Don’t do anything stupid out there,” she muttered fiercely. “And you haven’t got out of explaining what you’ve been doing for the last six months, either.” She drew back enough to look Nanoha in the eye. “Good luck. Take care.”

Suzuka was next, clasping her hand and petting Vesta gently, who licked her fingers in return. “Both of you be safe,” she ordered. “If the fight starts coming this way, tell us with telepathy and we’ll get out of here. Otherwise, focus on what you’re doing and... and not getting hurt.”

_‘Nanoha! Nanoha, where are you? Can you hear me?’_

“Fate’s calling me,” Nanoha said, trembling a little. “I... all of you, I promise, I’ll come back. We’ll win this. I promise.”

“Not just you!”

It was the pink-haired girl. Chikaze. She stared at Nanoha; half angry and half imploring. “Hayate... she wouldn’t hurt anyone. Ever. If the Book is making her hurt people, that’s not her fault! You have to help her! Bring her back safe too!”

Nanoha grinned.

“Don’t worry. If the Book is making her hurt people, I’ll just make it shut up and listen to her instead. You said she made the Wolkenritter good. I’m sure she can do the same to the Book! And if she doesn’t want to, I’ll make her!”

_‘Nanoha!’_

_‘Coming! I’m at the hospital, where are you?’_ She slipped out of the window, shooting up into the cold, still air. Frozen rain droplets scattered off her, and Vesta huddled further into her hood with a disgruntled hiss.

_‘We’re heading your way. We’re...’_ Fate’s voice sounded slightly disgruntled, _‘... on the same side as the TSAB for the moment. This is bigger than any of us.’_

_‘Right! How close are you?’_

A whisper in the air behind her, and an arm folded around her shoulders.

“Here,” said Fate. “Are you alright? We know who the Book’s master is.”

“A girl called Hayate, right?” Nanoha asked, and took no small pleasure in Fate’s surprise. “Mama met one of her friends, they’re down in the hospital. Where... ah.”

Four shapes approached through the rain and gloom. Fate must have drawn ahead of them to reach Nanoha first. Arf was in her human form, along with the huge spearman, the Harlaown boy, and...

“Yuuno!” Nanoha exclaimed.

“Not now, Takamachi,” Harlaown cut her off curtly. “We don’t have much time, so here’s the plan. A few more of our mages managed to get here before the barrier went up. I don’t know what we’re doing on the outside, because it’s shut down telepathy as well as escape. Most of our boots on the ground are A- to B-rank, so I’ve ordered them to gather up any civilians who got caught and extract them as far as the barrier will allow.”

He held up his Device. It wasn’t the same one he’d had last time they’d fought. This one was a white and blue spear, and from what little Nanoha knew about Devices, it looked... advanced. Very advanced, in fact. A peer to Raising Heart.

“This is Durandal. Admiral Graham gave it to me,” Chrono explained. “It’s an incredibly powerful sealing device; one that’s been tuned and prepared as a weapon against the Book. If you can pin it down, I can suppress it. Captain Grangeitz, will you lead the assault?”

Nanoha looked up at the huge man, who nodded as Chrono finished. “I thought I recognised the Device,” he said. “I don’t like our chances against a rampant Book, but I like our chances of breaking this barrier even less, and it’s a sound plan otherwise. Testarossa, Takamachi, if you’ll follow orders, you’ll back me up as I engage it. Scyra, run defence and see if you can boost the sealing spell. Harlaown, you’re the most critical part of this; engage only as far as you’ll be safe from counterattack.”

“Speaking of attacks, why haven’t we had any yet?” Arf spoke up. “The Book’s active, so where is it? We’re the only things in here, right? What’s distracting it from us?”

There was a long, sick pause before she and Fate locked gazes and spoke as one. “The Mariage!”

They were gone in an instant, Zest following swiftly after them. Nanoha wasted no time in following. The magical battle she and her friends had felt in the hospital was petering out at the edge of her senses, and she bore down on it as fast as she could. Despite her speed, it was fading fast enough that she almost missed it. It was only spotting Fate and Zest hanging motionless in the air; Arf clinging to Fate in puppy form, that stopped her in time to see what they’d come across.

Burning ichor covered the street. It had sprayed across the walls, and the guttering chemical light threw eerie shadows at every corner. Here and there, isolated body parts lay frozen in dark-tinted ice; prevented from breaking down by the spells that had severed them. A foot. An arm.

A head, its visor still glowing a faint green.

In the centre of the carnage stood a white-haired woman, wearing a black dress. Four great wings of dark mana extended out behind her, and a white casting triangle of chilling size spun lazily around her feet. In her right hand she held a staff, with three spearheads forming a cross at its head. In her left, she held a tome that none of them failed to recognise. Both arms were soaked up to the elbows with burning gore, dripping off her in thick droplets that gave off acrid smoke where they landed. She paid it no more attention than a mountain did the rain.

There was no sign of the Wolkenritter. As she turned to look at them with crimson eyes, Nanoha could see clear tracks of tears tracing down her cheeks.

... she couldn’t see any wounds, though. And as she watched, the grief on the woman’s face twisted into all-consuming rage.

_‘Aww no,’_ said Vesta quietly. _‘This is gonna suck.’_

... 

Nothing hurt.

That was odd.

Wrong, even.

Hayate Yagami slowly came back to herself, blinking around in confusion. She had been…

… she didn’t remember where she had been. Or what had happened, exactly. Only that it had been very bad, and very scary, and she hadn’t known what was happening or why or how.

And it had hurt. It had hurt so, so much. Not just in her legs and hips and arms and skin; long-dulled sensation flaring after months of almost nothing. It had hurt inside, too. And that pain had been worse by far, though she couldn’t place why…

And now she was here. Wherever ‘here’ was. She had her wheelchair, even though… even though something told her she shouldn’t for some reason, and she sat in a vast dark place with nothing in sight. She couldn’t see any ground under her wheels, and the only light came from the black sky above; speckled with stars.

It wasn’t a _bad_ dark, though. In fact, she felt quite good. Better than she had in ages. The air was cool and fresh, and the stars were beautiful. She could see them so clearly – like a school trip she remembered from years ago. Her whole class had gone out on a weekend trip, far away from the city, and she had seen the night sky away from any light pollution or cloud cover. It had looked like someone had sprinkled diamonds across a witch’s cloak, and she’d been able to pick out every single constellation and planet the teachers had talked about - even the lacy glittering scarf of the Milky Way, laid out across the void.

… come to think of it, she couldn’t see any of them here. Not because they weren’t clear. Just because… the patterns weren’t there.

“What is this place?” she whispered. “What happened? Something was… something was wrong. I was scared…” Her breath sped up a little at the memory – and it came easily. She didn’t have to struggle for it at all; it felt almost like it was rushing to fill her lungs of its own accord.

Had she really been that sick? It had crept up on her so slowly. It was only now that she realised how bad it had been.

“Hello?” she tried. “Is anyone there? Where _am_ I?”

“You are safe.”

A vaguely familiar-looking woman with white hair and red eyes stepped out of _absolutely nowhere_ a metre or two in front of her. And then knelt, which was a really annoying habit that had taken Hayate weeks to train her Knights out o-

Her Knights.

Her _Knights!_

The sound Hayate made next, with lungs that were obeying her unhindered for the first time in months and a volume she hadn’t been capable of in years, was half wail, half scream and a heartbroken mixture of wild grief, furious denial and utter devastation. She thrashed and shook her head and pounded at the armrests of her chair as it all came flooding back. Slipping out of the wheelchair, she fell to the ground and tailed off into gut-wrenching sobs that wracked her whole body.

Tears streamed from her eyes as she curled into a ball, hugging herself, clawing at her arms and chest to try and get at the pain in her heart. It felt like her ribs were buckling inward one by one, like a crushing black weight had replaced all her organs, like a spiky ball was growing inside her and pushing spines out through her stomach and spine.

Her Knights were dead.

Those _things_ had come, and her Knights had tried to protect her, and now they were dead.

They were dead, and she was alone again.

Except she wasn’t. Cool arms wrapped around her and lifted her back into her chair, smoothing her tears away and resting on her shoulders until her wails tailed off into sobbing and the sobbing died down into whimpers and the whimpers, eventually, faded into silence. Hayate clung to the figure; the strange woman whose kindness was her last anchor, and trembled with sorrow and misery.

“You are safe,” the woman repeated. Her voice was a gentle monotone. It reminded Hayate a little bit of Signum in how deep it was and a little of how Shamal in its inflictions, but it wasn’t really either. She couldn't place the accent, or the style of the black dress the woman wore.

“I am your servant, mistress, and I will protect you.” Shifting back, the woman went back to kneeling, and tears prickled at Hayate’s eyes.

“My Knights…” she sniffed.

“Are not lost, mistress,” the woman reassured her. Or... tried to reassure her. There was an artificial air to her – in the way her expression never changed from calm neutrality, and her voice stayed at the same soft tone no matter what she said. “They were struck down, but they were recovered. They lie safe within me now, as I punish those who slew them.”

A tiny seed of hope bloomed. “They’re… alive?” She let out a soft breath of wonder. “They’re _alive_. And… who are you, anyway? What… what do you mean, ‘within you’? Stop kneeling at me!”

The woman rose. “I am the Master Program of the Book of Darkness,” she said without missing a beat. “I serve you, my mistress, and enact your will. I punish those who have hurt you, and keep you safe. When your enemies massed around you and a cruel destiny threatened your health, I sent out the Guardian Knights to defend you from your foes and slow the curse’s grip. Now that your enemies move against you, I have woken to protect you in person.”

Curling up as much as she could in the wheelchair, Hayate shook her head. “I don’t... I don’t know what you’re talking about... I don’t... I want my Knights.” Tears stung at her eyes. She wanted Signum’s firm and stoic presence, Vita’s loud brash vows of protection, Zafira’s quiet, philosophical observations, Shamal’s warmth and gentle care. She wanted them here to see and hug and to keep her safe. They’d sworn to never leave her, even if she’d had to convince them they needn’t fight. “I want...”

She trailed off.

“What do you mean,” she said slowly, her head rising with sudden strength, “by ‘slow its grip’?”

The Book blinked, hesitating for a moment. Insofar as Hayate could tell, she seemed confused. “I sent out the Knights to gather Linker Cores and feed the curse’s hunger, to lighten its grip on you. Surely they told you this?”

“They said their old masters made them... but I told them they didn’t have to fight. I _promised_ they wouldn’t have to hurt anyone anymore!” The Book actually took a step back at her ferocity, though that might have been more because she’d wheeled half a pace forward as her voice rose.

“Mistress Hayate...”

“No. If I don’t know this, I should. Tell me _everything_ ,” Hayate demanded. “Where are my Knights? What have they been doing? _What is going on?_ ”

... 

A wind picked up, in the still air of the barrier. Sloughing off burning Mariage-blood, the Book raised one hand. Its red eyes were devoid of human emotion – save, perhaps, a cold clinical contempt.

“Bring forth spears and infuse them with blood,” it said. It spoke in the same archaic tongue as Signum’s Device, but its voice was strange; resonating as though it were echoing out of some deep inner cavern. “Drill through, Bloody Dagger!”

Fate was already moving as a hail of red dagger-lights shot out. Orange shields wrapped around her, enclosing her limbs and torso in a mockery of plate armour, and she shot sideways. Just outmanoeuvring them wasn’t enough, though - they tracked her as she flew. Nanoha had vanished, but a dozen crimson streaks were moving with unerring purpose towards an unseen target, and the Book had fired in such volume that even Scrya and Harlaown were being assaulted. Five grouped volleys, each tracking independently - even through stealth measures.

And this with _one spell!_ Even if the Book had to chant like that before each casting, this kind of power made it terrifying. She couldn’t afford to let it get another shot off. Four precisely aimed Plasma Lancers took out the clustered spells tracking her; each shot colliding with a dagger and disrupting those around it as it exploded. Grangeitz had gone straight through the daggers aimed at him, dispersing them with a twirl of his spear and charging the Book with a speed move. The point of his Device shone sun-bright as it bore down on the Book’s heart.

With a blurred, distorted motion, the staff came up and stopped him cold.

Fate’s eyes widened. That movement! It had been... _wrong_. The Book’s arm hadn’t moved, it had _stuttered_. For a moment it had been in two places at once - and even as she watched it hold back the force behind Grangeitz’s attack, the whole limb flickered and distorted. The Lost Logia was malfunctioning somehow; damaged on the inside.

Damaged, but still functional. The other hand came up, the glowing tome hovering above it. It snapped open, pages fluttering, and dark orange motes of light began to spill from them - the same colour as Grangeitz’s magic. They swarmed towards him...

“Asbor-”

A cartridge shell clinked against the street.

[Explosion!]

Both figures vanished in the thunderous detonation. Grangeitz shot back from the cloud of smoke and debris, crouched low and wary. Barely had he come to a stop when something long and thin whipped out of the cloud after him. Like a serpent, flame-wreathed metal darted forth.

The Blade’s sword!

But it wasn’t the Blade who held it. Advancing out of the smoke was the Book of Darkness, unmarred by the blast and wielding the sword in place of her staff with practiced skill. Its stance, its speed, its familiarity with the weapon... they were Signum’s. Fate could tell.

“Bardiche. Cycle to 25%.” 

Her Device shifted as the slats opened, and the black metal took on a dull red glow as the Seed’s mana mingled with hers. Red casting circles formed around her and began to shoot a steady stream of Plasma Lancers down at the Book, punching into the black wings it spread behind it and distracting it from Grangeitz.

“Testarossa! What the-”

The rest of Harlaown’s sentence was drowned out by a roar of wind. The Book’s wings doubled and then trebled in size; increasing its wingspan to a solid two metres. With an explosive rush of air, it took to the skies, the white casting triangle following it. Grangeitz swore and launched into pursuit as a thin beam of burning pink seared across her shields, but to no avail.

_‘Is this really the time?’_ she yelled back, shooting after the Book herself. Bardiche snapped out into its scythe form with a thought; the blade crackling like ruby lightning.

_‘You stuck a_ Class One Lost Logia _in your_ Device _and you’re trying to hit the_ Book of Darkness _in the face with it! Yes, this is the time! I’d expect this from Takamachi, not from the one who’s meant to know how Dimensional Space works! Do you have any idea what could happen if...’_

Fate tuned him out. The Book was retaliating against Nanoha with huge swarms of arrow-like shooting spells, though it seemed to have lost track of her exact position. White chains shot from the casting triangle at its back, tangling around Grangeitz and hurling him towards the ground. Fate tried her own advance, leaving Harlaown behind as she closed the distance, but had to retreat as the chains came after her instead. Without letting up her assault on Nanoha, the Book left the tome hovering for a moment to fire four black bolts at the compass points of the barrier that had them trapped.

_‘Arf, Testarossa.’_ Her eyes narrowed. It was Scrya. _‘I can restrain the Book if Arf handles those chains. Then you and Zest can hit it at the same time. Nanoha’s going to try to- watch out!’_

Hanging in the air, the weapons of the Wolkenritter dismissed, the Book of Darkness raised its tome high above its head.

“I-in an ancient land, s-s-sink to the d-darkness,” it incanted. It was distorting again - its torso was flickering and twisting like a glitching hologram, and its voice rose and fell unpredictably. Still, the boiling mass of black-purple mana that rose from the tome’s pages and began to gather into a sphere looked all too functional. “D-Diabolic...”

[Divine Buster!]

Burning pink mana met boiling black-purple in an expanding cone even wider than the gathering sphere - and that was easily twice Fate’s height. Nanoha’s bombardment spell was even brighter than usual; blinding in its intensity, and Fate flinched away as Arf slammed up shields.

But the blast wave never hit. The detonation went off at an angle, streaking upwards into the clouds with a shrieking roar. The Book evaded; wings furling to drop like a stooping falcon, and another beam - thinner, dimmer, but still moving just as fast - hit it as she fell. Its staff came up to block it...

... and it was _forced back?_

Fate gasped as she realised the trick. The parry had sent the outer layers of the Divine Buster sloughing away, but an incandescent inner core had pushed the Book back anyway. Nanoha was altering the energy density of her spells! That first shot must have been almost hollow - all the power in the edges of the cone, to direct the Book’s attack up into the clouds. And the second... it had only looked weak on the _outside_. The core had been focused force.

Still not enough, though. The Book’s retreat under the beam slowed before it broke free completely, and Fate saw its lips move as it gained height once more and pointed towards the source of the beams. The aria wasn’t long. Six, maybe seven words.

Black lightning split the sky in two, two jagged forks narrowing in like claws closing in on hapless prey. Nanoha _screamed_.

_‘Now!’_

“Bardiche, 80%!”

Green bands locked in place around the Book’s arms, legs and wings, spreading along them until its whole body was enveloped in a thickening carapace. Orange chains wrapped around the white ones that hovered protectively around it, jerking them together and tying them down.

“Don’t let her get her arms free!”

“I’m trying, but she’s-”

Fate saw her chance and took it, flashing in at top speed from below as Grangeitz came in from above.

[Beschleunigen]

Light flared, and an impact jarred Fate’s arms from her fingers all the way down to her elbows. It wasn’t the meeting of weapon and flesh, though. This was the retort of metal on metal.

The Book’s right hand held the Breaker’s hammer, locked against Grangeitz’s spear. Its left held the Blade’s sword, holding Bardiche off with no visible sign of effort. A purple casting triangle turned like a lazy cuff at each wrist, and...

... and there were tears trickling from its eyes. Despite the emotionless mask, the white-haired woman was crying.

Fate had just enough time to process that before a blue blade hit the Book in the throat, and it vanished.

... that... that was _her Blitz Action!_ Fate hissed in anger. If the Book was building on the spells it had stolen, the situation was worse than she’d thought.

Thank the Kaisers it hadn’t drained Nanoha, she thought with a sudden chill.

“This isn’t working,” she panted to Grangeitz, scanning for where the Book had gone. “We need better tactics.”

“The arias,” he said. “Takamachi hit it in mid-sentence.”

Fate nodded. A flash of light drew her attention. “There!”

The Book hadn’t gone far. It was struggling with the blue wires that had wrapped themselves around its throat. One by one they fell away, and then it was chanting again, reciting another aria, bringing its staff around to track the moving form of Harlaown. Fate threw power into her own speed move - the new and improved version. Her Blitz Rush took her around behind her enemy and she threw an Arc Saber with all the force she could muster.

Time crawled like molasses as she realised. It wasn’t going to make it in time.

It all but froze as she realised what else was in the Book’s line of fire.

_‘Nanoha!’_ she screamed, summoning another Blitz Rush and throwing _herself_ at the Book; outpacing her Arc Saber as the world turned to blurred lines and fear. _‘The hospital!’_

She hit the Book feet first just as the bombardment spell fired. Her Arc Saber struck the staff a moment later, and that was perhaps the only thing that saved Harlaown; jerking the beam off-course and down. Grangeitz had dived as she did; not at the Book but into the path of the spell. He blazed like a small sun as he split the attack in half, but the shockwave and the plume of mana carried on, crashing down on the buildings in the city below. Roofs, walls and streets were ripped up and sent hurtling along like bullets ahead of the cloud of debris.

It struck the hospital dead on, and carved a hole the size of a house through the heart of it.

... 

The dust settled. Green light died.

“... that was too close,” breathed the girl in the white dress, looking up at the hole - Nanoha, Chikaze reminded herself; her name was Nanoha. “Way, way too close.”

The outer walls of the hospital groaned, and began to crumble like a wet sandcastle. The crash of falling masonry was a reminder of how close that had been. Nanoha glanced back at them as if she had to check they were really there. Chikaze wasn’t surprised. Her own heart was a hammering drum in her chest. She was suddenly very, very glad she hadn’t made a fuss about grabbing her things. Or getting dressed. Or anything that would have delayed them getting out of the building. The cat woman cradling Chikaze in her arms had her teeth bared and her ears flat against her head; probably thinking along the same lines.

Standing in the centre of the fading green dome, the boy who had saved them was panting. He waved Nanoha off as she approached.

“It’s fine,” he assured her. “The building took the bulk of it.”

Chikaze eyed the collapsing building dubiously. The light had just gone straight through. How had that boy managed to stop it, even if the hospital getting in the way had helped?

“Where-” Nanoha began, and what was left of the hospital exploded as something came crashing through it, ploughing into the courtyard and throwing up broken tiles and a shower of dirt that punched straight through the clustered group and hurled them to the ground. Chikaze cried out as she hit the hard concrete and rolled to a stop, squinting with swimming vision at whatever had hit them.

It rose, glowing with black-violet power, and looked down at her like a goddess. The face that took her in was one of cool, calm, implacable resolve. It reminded her of old statues she’d seen on school trips. Human shapes without any of the warmth or feeling.

And yet for all its brutal apathy, tears still spilled down its cheeks. And Chikaze knew it.

“... Hayate...” she whispered, eyes wide with fear, horror and grief.

The figure twitched. For a second her features distorted, like running wax or the image on a flickering television. She half-split, pulling apart into two reflections joined at the hip, then snapped back together again as if nothing had changed. The staff in her hand gleamed in the dim light.

And she turned away.

“Wha-” Nanoha gasped, and then lit up. “Hayate-chan! Fight it! I know y- ahh!” She dived aside, the bladed tip of the staff barely missing her. There was no hesitation in the not-Hayate’s movements now, no pausing or hesitation. She was trying to kill them. And while she was focused on Nanoha, the green boy and the cat woman for the moment, Chikaze could see what would happen if she got within range of Momoko and the girls. Momoko’s son and daughter had their swords up, but they looked scared – even her husband looked scared. And Chikaze knew that simple steel wouldn’t be enough to stop a powerful magic construct. Especially not one that had Signum as part of her.

“Hhh-” she tried to shout, but her voice wasn’t working. Her body felt like lead, and her stomach _hurt_ \- the deep, sick ache that was halfway between pain and nausea. _‘Hayate!’_ she tried instead, broadcasting with all the strength she could. _‘Hayate, please, stop! Don’t do this!’_

_‘I am not Hayate,’_ came the answer, surprising perhaps nobody more than Chikaze. The voice was Hayate’s, and at the same time it wasn’t. It was deeper, resonating oddly and stuttering as if it were having trouble with some of the words. _‘I must do this. It is my p-purpose.’_

_‘If... if you’re not Hayate, who are you?’_ Chikaze asked desperately. The woman let go of the tome to draw a sword from thin air and lash out at Nanoha with two weapons, sending her skidding backwards with a jagged crack through her protective barrier. The cat woman lunged, her hands wreathed in red claws, and barely avoided a retaliatory strike that would have removed a limb. _‘Please,_ please _stop!’_

_‘I am the Book of D-Darkness.’_ The woman’s mental voice gave no impression of effort or distraction. It was a controlled monotone, devoid of expression. And yet, Chikaze couldn’t forget the tears. _‘Identify yourself.’_

_‘It... it’s Chikaze. I’m Hayate’s friend!’_

Just for a moment she thought the Book began to turn towards her. Then green light wrapped around the figure like a cage and yanked her upwards so fast that Chikaze barely saw her leave. Nanoha and the tigress followed. The paving stones cracked with the force of their take-off.

She lay there for a while as her heart settled and the thunder receded. The wet ground under her back was cold and seemed much more real than everything else around her. This was even worse than that night she first met Hayate. Maybe she could pretend it was just fireworks. Just for a little bit. After a moment or two, Momoko scrambled over to help her sit upright with an arm around her back. Chikaze leaned into her warmth.

“Chikaze-chan! Are you alright? That was a nasty fall; are you hurt?”

“I’m... fine,” Chikaze said faintly. She was trembling all over, but Momoko was a warm, soft presence. She wasn’t _her_ mother, but she was still a mother – and she seemed to know more than Chikaze did about what was going on. “... why am I fine?”

“Pardon?”

She looked up into Momoko’s face and gestured weakly at the destruction around them. “She attacked everyone,” she said. “Even you, and you didn’t do anything. But she didn’t attack me and I tried to talk to her. She knew I was there. She d-didn’t do anything.” She swallowed, unable to control the shakes “Why not?” she managed to force out.

Momoko gave this a few seconds thought before shaking her head. She tried to lift Chikaze into a half-walking, half-carried position. “Dear, I don’t think that’s-”

“It _is_ important!” Chikaze insisted heatedly, and lapsed into a coughing fit. “She... she was i-in there, a-and something’s _broken_ with the Book, but she didn’t attack me and when I talked to her, she _talked back!_ ”

Momoko’s eyes widened, but Chikaze had no time or patience to argue with her about it. Grabbing the older woman’s hand, she squinted upwards at the multicoloured light show and reopened the channel, extending a sideband to Momoko so that she could hear.

_‘Why are you doing this? Why are you hurting people? Please stop! You’re talking to me, listen to them too!’_

The response took a moment. But it came.

_‘I must protect my mistress.’_

Momoko gasped; a quiet indrawn breath. Chikaze saw her reach for her own Device out of the corner of her eye, and dimly felt her open another channel. She shook her head.

“Don’t distract me,” she whispered. “I think I can talk her out of it, but I can’t pay attention to two conversations at once.”

The awareness of the second channel faded with Momoko’s nod, and Chikaze closed her eyes and tried to ignore the pounding of her head. The Book was still talking.

_‘They are threats,’_ she was saying. _‘All are threats. Everywhere; enemies. I will grant my mistress’s wish of p-p-peace. I will destroy those who would hurt my mistress before they can harm her. I will avenge my knights who died in her service.’_

Stabbing her would have been kinder. Chikaze’s lips shaped a soundless ‘no’ as she gasped with pain.

The Wolkenritter. Signum. Vita. Shamal. Zafira.

Dead.

It... it couldn’t be! She’d seen Zafira less than half an hour ago! He’d been _fine_ ; unharmed, tending to...

... to Hayate.

Who was now the Book of Darkness.

“They can’t...” she said in a small voice. “They... they can’t be...”

“... I’m so sorry, darling,” Momoko said. In the distance, Chikaze could hear deafening crashes; a series of them that shook the earth with every impact. The ground was trembling beneath her like an earthquake, and she could hear the roar of flames from somewhere nearby. Light flashed; too bright to make out the colour, reflecting off the buildings and painting the gloom a blinding white for a second before fading just as quickly.

Chikaze ignored all of it. She turned into Momoko’s embrace and felt the older woman shift her into her lap, surrounding her with warmth and comfort. Someone touched her shoulder sympathetically, and a hand slipped into hers.

“Nanoha... hold on,” Momoko murmured. “Nanoha says... the Book reabsorbed them, she thinks. It’s using their weapons and fighting styles. They may not be... she says they were wounded, but they haven’t seen any proof they were killed.”

From the sound of it, she was aware it was scant comfort. But Chikaze couldn’t mourn. She couldn’t cry, not now, not while everyone was in danger. And if they were part of the Book again, maybe they weren’t really _dead_. She clung to that hope desperately, winding it round clenched fists and girding herself with it. Hope wasn’t always enough to cure someone, but having it was far better than lacking it.

_‘What... what about me?’_ Chikaze asked tentatively. _‘A-am I a threat?’_

There was, for a moment, a deep and echoing silence through the link - more than just a lack of words; an emptiness of thought.

_‘You are n-not recognised,’_ the Book said eventually. The last word was almost drowned out by a howling explosion, and Chikaze flinched as a wall of dust-choked wind slammed into them, yanking at her hair and clothes and almost tipping Momoko over. She felt the two girls huddle closer to her and Momoko; safeguarding her in the middle and stabilising all four of them. They all looked like ghosts now, covered in pale dust.

_‘You are threat-ally-knight-undefined what-wh-what are you?’_ There was, for the first time, a trace of agitation to the Book’s voice. _‘You-y-you...’_

The link cut off.

Chikaze blinked, yelped, and scrambled to re-establish it. _‘Hey!’_ she projected. _‘Why did you do that?’_

Another searing light flashed and the ground _jolted_ like a kick from a horse. All four of them tipped over, Chikaze landing safely on Momoko as the girls fell to either side. She squeezed her eyes shut and focused on the link.

_‘My mistress is in danger. I am protecting her. Identify yourself.’_ It was back to the echoing, emotionless monotone, and Chikaze got the feeling she’d missed something.

_‘No, why did you cut the link? And what... what do you mean I’m not recognised? I’m Chikaze, I told you that! And then you said I was undefined or... or something.’_

This earned her another deep silence. _‘You-you are threat/not-threat,’_ the Book said after a moment, the confusion coming back. _‘Knight/not-knight ally-threat what are y-you? My se-senses...’_

And again, without warning, the link cut off. If anything, it was harsher this time. Like a window being slammed down on Chikaze’s fingers. She flinched, and Momoko squeezed her arm gently before she could try again.

“I think it’s you, dear,” she murmured. “Nanoha is saying it hesitated when you asked. Not by much, but enough to notice. It can’t answer your question for some reason.”

Chikaze frowned. “You said she was broken...” she whispered. “Maybe...”

Her eyes widened. “Maybe she can’t tell she’s broken,” she breathed. “Maybe the bits that tell her whether she’s broken or not are broken. Like...” She gulped, thinking back to long days spent in hospital, to doctors trying to explain was wrong with her body in words she could understand. “... like when the bits... the bits in your body that are meant to kill your cells when they break... when _those_ bits break... and the cell can go crazy. Because it doesn’t know it’s gone wrong. So it doesn’t stop.”

“... sorry, I don’t think I...” began Momoko, but Chikaze was already reopening the link, bolstered by the new knowledge. She was tiring fast, and copying the channel to Momoko was too much for her, but she kept up her assault as fiercely as she could.

_‘Something’s wrong with you!’_ she called out. _‘That’s why you’re fighting; you’re... you’re not_ seeing _things right! You think everyone is a threat but they’re_ not! _You’re crying! I saw you! What are you crying about? Is it the knights?’_

_‘Get down!’_ shouted... someone. Chikaze wasn’t really up to distinguishing voices at this point. She felt something go up around them; some sort of protection spell, and then...

_Heat_. Baking, stifling, acrid heat. She forced her eyes open to find pink-green light fading around them, marking a tiny clear area among scorched-black paving stones. The remains of the hospital were charred black, and a tower block on the other side of the street was just _gone_ ; collapsing into red-hot molten metal and piles of glowing slag.

_‘It’s okay!’_ Nanoha called down, her voice strained but trying for cheerful. _‘She missed us! Sorry for that; Fate and Mr Grangeitz are trying to keep her up high, but she’s really fast! We’ll try harder to keep her away next time – just keep low and stay safe!’_

_‘These are Hayate’s tears,’_ the Book responded. _‘I feel no sorrow. I am simply a tool of my mistress’s wishes.’_

Chikaze closed her eyes again, huddling into Momoko and frowning. There was, she was pretty sure, a bit more emotion than there had been before in the Book’s voice. Was that uncertainty?

_‘You’re lying,’_ she guessed. _‘You’re sad about the Wolkenritter, aren’t you? Well I am too! I cared about them as well! You can admit it to me even if you don’t to anyone else!’_

_‘I am a ma-magical tome,’_ the Book responded, and yes, that was definitely a hesitation in her voice. The echoing underlayer intensified and then faded with each word. _‘I-I-I feel no sadness-ness. I grant I-I grant my mistress wish f-for peace.’_

_‘No!’_ Chikaze shook her head, tears coming to her eyes. _‘You_ are _sad! And angry! I understand that! But they wouldn’t want you to do this!’_

This seemed to put the Book back on firmer ground. Thunder cracked and boomed, and a low thrumming note pealed out that Chikaze felt resonate through her ribcage. _‘My mistress is threatened,’_ she stated.

_‘She’s_ not! _’_ Chikaze projected the words with all the strength she had. _‘Just... just_ think! _Signum didn’t think everything was an enemy! Vita got on fine with other people! Shamal a-and Zafira didn’t... didn’t go around attacking everyone! Hayate, please! I know you’re in there,_ remember! _Come back! Stop hurting people!’_

She felt Momoko stiffen under her, but ignored it in favour of the Book’s response. _‘The knights...’_ it said slowly. _‘My m-m-my knights d-defend... protect my... all are...’_

The link cut off again, a pang of pain echoing back down it, but this time Chikaze was ready. _‘Remember your knights!’_ she threw at it. _‘If they’re part of you now then you should remember what they did! They weren’t broken! They could see not everything wasn’t a threat! So_ one _of you is wrong, and_ they were here longer! _’_

“Chikaze,” Momoko said urgently. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

“Huh?” Chikaze blinked, breathing hard; barely able to keep telepathy and speech separate. “Why?” she croaked.

“Because Nanoha says it’s working.”

... 

The world was dark and calm and peaceful. Aside from the two of them, there was only the soft velvet blackness all around.

Hayate shook her head slowly as the Book’s explanation wound to an end. “You-” she started, and had to break off. “That can’t...”

Only it could. Looking back, she could see the signs. Her Knights... her Knights had been _lying_ to her. For _weeks_ – maybe even months! And she hadn’t known. She hadn’t noticed what they were doing as they went out and... and attacked people to help her.

She hadn’t _seen_.

“How many...” she croaked. “How... how many people did they hurt? For me? Wait, no.” She looked down, biting her lip. “I don’t want to know.” Though she would be having a long and _loud_ talk about what they’d done i- _when_ ; when she saw them again.

It had to be a ‘when’.

She held her silence for only a few seconds before breaking. “Just... did they kill anyone?” she blurted out. “Or... or cripple anyone? In ways that won’t get better?”

“... no, mistress,” said the Book after an uncomfortably long pause.

“Don’t _lie_ to me!”

The Book didn’t flinch. “I would not and could not, mistress-

“ _Hayate!_ ” The word was a scream. “My name is Hayate! I’m not a mistress or a conqueror or a… a Belkan noble or even a princess! I don’t ride around on a horse! I don’t have a castle! My name is Hayate Yagami and I’m from Earth and I don’t _care_ about your titles! Use my _name!_ ”

“... understood, Lady Hayate.” That seemed to be as far as she would relent, and Hayate had more important things to get from her right now. The title argument would be a thing for later – and there was going to be a later! “As I said, I would not and cannot lie to you. The Knights destroyed a number of Mariage units, but killed no-one else.” She paused. “My records of their activities indicate that they were quite deliberate in avoiding fatalities.”

“Then where are they? Where am _I?_ What is this place?”

Hesitating for a moment in what Hayate guessed was her ‘working out what the question is’ state, the Book shook her head. “The Guardian Knights are not available at this time. They have been reintegrated into the Book of Darkness, which is currently active according to defence protocols. The protocols dictate that to maximise peak throughput, all external assets including the authorised user should be-”

“No, you stupid…!” Hayate felt like screaming. Then remembered that her lungs didn’t hurt anymore and there was nobody else around, and did. It made her feel better. Slightly.

“Lady Hayate?” the Book said neutrally, in a way which somehow implied that she was being childish.

“I don’t understand… I thought _you_ were the Book?” she demanded, wincing as her now-sore throat complained. “Are you saying they’re part of you? Give them back!”

The Book’s expression shuttered for another long pause, and Hayate gritted her teeth, frustration boiling through her veins. Though… thinking back… something about the way the white-haired woman stood jogged at her memory.

… yes, that was it. The way she held herself… her face was still relatively placid, but there was a sort of stiff rigidity to her limbs that hadn’t been there a moment before. It sort of put Hayate in mind of the way Zafira went all still and loose and relaxed at sudden loud noises or bad news from the doctors, just in the opposite direction.

Maybe she wasn’t the only one getting frustrated here.

“When your enemies attacked,” the Book began slowly, though Hayate couldn’t tell if it was working out what to say as it went or just thought she needed time to understand, “the compound system known as the Book of Darkness took its mistress; Hayate Yagami, inside itself to ensure she was protected. This place is the heart of the tome; a virtual dimensional space at its innermost core. The exterior programs are engaged with ambient threats, and as such this is the safest place for you. I am, and am not, the Book. I am the Master Program; the watcher and weaver of spells who binds the rest together. The Guardian Knights, the Tome, the Defence Programs, the Master Core… all of these together are the ‘Book of Darkness’, and were once the Tome of the Night Sky.”

She paused again, this time only for a moment. “Does this help you understand, Lady Hayate?”

“… no. I mean, yes.” Hayate made a face, her temper stuttering out as tiredness started to creep up on her. “I still don’t understand, and I’m not sure I can. But I… sort of understand what I’m not understanding a bit better now?”

The Book bowed her head, and Hayate didn’t think she was imagining the faintest trace of relief on her face. “All is well, then. Rest now, Lady Hayate. I will defend you against your foes and wake you when you are safe again.”

_‘-yate!’_

“… Chikaze?”

She blinked. For a moment there had been… what? An echo of her friend’s voice? Or just a vivid memory? Hayate looked around at the featureless expanse around her and the glittering sky above. She and the Book – the Master Program – were alone. And yet...

“No ‘Chikaze’ is present, Lady Hayate,” the Book pointed out calmly. “It would be best for you to sleep-”

_‘-don’t do-’_

There it was again. Hayate pinned the Book with a fierce stare. “That _is_ Chikaze! Why can I hear her? What’s going on?”

Something flickered in the woman’s eyes. “My defence programs are engaged in combat. Something is... is interfering. Lady Hayate, you must sleep.” She moved closer – just half a step – and held her palm out as if pressing against something. A sudden exhaustion came over Hayate. She felt... drowsy. Sleepy. Her vision blurred, and a yawn snuck up on her. Maybe the Book was right. Maybe she should just...

Hayate bit her lip as hard as she could and pounded the wheelchair’s arm in pain. The cloak of tiredness disintegrated like mist under sunlight. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and _listened_ , as hard as she could. Chikaze’s voice was faint – so, so faint that it was barely there. But she could make out bits and pieces.

_‘-ease, stop... hurting peop... listen-’_

“What are you doing?” she said. It wasn’t really a question. Hollow dread filled her as she saw the answer looming up in front of her. “What do you mean, engaged in combat? Who are you fighting? Show me!” The last command was a snap, and for the first time, the Book showed a hint of an expression. It wasn’t a happy one. But after a momentary frown, she dipped her head in acknowledgement and gestured with an arm at...

_... grey-suited figures with blades and guns for arms, swarming towards her and burning and falling and dying..._

_... a huge man with a whirling spear, rocketing towards her in a crackling nimbus of lightning..._

_... a girl dressed all in white, throwing up pink shields left and right while she shouted something desperately..._

_... a blonde girl with a scythe, weaving around bloody daggers so fast that she blurred..._

_... two teenagers wearing ripped and dusty clothing, backing away in fright with raised swords in hand..._

_... a pair of young girls, purple and blonde, holding hands tightly as they hid behind an older woman with dirt and soot smeared on her face..._

The images flickered past, frozen snapshots like frames pulled from a fight. Hayate felt ice pour down her spine.

“Those... those aren’t enemies!” she said, her voice rising high and shrill. “Apart from the zombies! The zombies are still enemies! But all the rest are _people!_ Why are you fighting _them?_ ”

“They are threats,” the Book replied calmly. “They show hostile intent.”

“Because you’re fighting them!” Hayate started to hyperventilate. If... if the Book was fighting, outside, if it was as deadly as her Knights were...

If anyone else got hurt...

“You have to stop!” she shouted. “You have to stop, you can’t hurt them! If you just stop then they won’t attack, they’re _not threats!_ Those first two girls _protected_ me; the last ones aren’t even proper mages!”

She might as well have been talking to a stone. “They are threats,” the Book repeated. “Hayate, you cannot give an order that would result in your death. Worry not. I will protect you from those who would kill you.”

“They don’t _want_ to kill me! Those last few weren’t even mages! They’re not even... not even...” Hayate shook her head as her eyes widened. “You said... is there anything around me that _isn’t_ a threat?”

The pause was agonising. And then...

“Chikaze...” Her friend looked terrible. Weak and pale and drawn, covered in dust and tiny bits of brick and soil, lying down with her head and torso supported against something the image didn’t show. There was no flickering of images this time. No rapid scrolling through a list.

“Just Chikaze? That’s... that’s it?”

Uncertainty. That was definitely uncertainty she saw in the Book’s eyes, and her face twitched to match it. “She is an anomaly,” the construct admitted. “I cannot classify her. I will not engage her until I have verified her status.”

“... but you think everything else is a threat,” Hayate said numbly as the pieces slotted together into a new and altogether horrifying picture. “You... you won’t let me back out because you think I won’t be in danger. And you saved my Knights, but you won’t send them back out because you’re busy fighting the things you think are threats. But if you think _everything_ is a threat...”

The Book watched her calmly. Placidly, even. It was a very peaceful expression for something that was going to attack everything in sight until something stopped it.

This wasn’t just about saving her family anymore.

This was about saving the world.

... 

It was working.

It was working slowly and painfully, in fits and starts. For every five steps forward they managed, the Book pushed them back by four. Nanoha was bruised and battered and more tired than she’d been in her life. Her ribs ached, her lungs burned, her fingers felt like they were on fire and she was pretty sure there was blood dripping in her eye. When this was over, she was probably going to collapse and have to spend weeks in bed.

But it was working.

Nanoha spared half a second to mentally bless Chikaze as she dropped under an arrow and returned fire with a wave of binding shots. Raising Heart was at 50% cycle, and shifted fluidly between its spear and sealing modes as she parried and riposted. She could afford to, now. Chikaze’s last unsecured broadcast must have struck a nerve, because the Book’s attacks were getting less lethal.

… well, a bit less lethal. One of Vita’s metal balls herded her into a trap, and she had to shift her thought train for a moment to frantically break a bind on her leg before the follow-up arrived. Vesta proved up to the task, clawing it apart and slicing the shooting spell in two with a grunt.

_‘Is it me, or is her aim getting worse?’_ she asked, frowning over at where the Book was pursuing Fate with a swirling field of hovering debris.

Nanoha thought back. Yes, she realised. It was. About a third of the Book’s attacks were missing entirely now; sailing past their targets to wreck who knew what kind of damage without even forcing them to dodge. _‘Maybe Chikaze’s getting through to her?’_ she panted, moving into a level circling flight that took her round to flank the Book from her left. If she could get a good shot at that tome… _‘Where’s Chrono?’_

Pacing her at her side, Vesta looked around, ears and whiskers twitching. _‘Up high,’_ she said after a moment. _‘There, see? Oh, and look down there!’_

Nanoha looked. Far below them, three tiny dots were approaching the faint glimmer of green in the remains of the hospital. She magnified the image with her visor and smiled at the sight of her father and siblings. Their swords were sheathed, but she was willing to bet they were carrying live steel.

Good. That would keep Mama safe.

“Takamachi.”

It was Zest, drawing up alongside her on the right. He’d discarded the coat, and several green and blue shimmers marked dormant spells hosted on him, waiting to activate when he got them close enough. Nanoha nodded and held out a hand, gripping his offered wrist.

“Energy Share,” she whispered, and let the power flow. This was the third time she’d done it so far. Going after her for using the Jewel Seeds in her Device, he seemed to have decided, could wait. For now, the virtually unlimited stamina it gave them was all that was letting them keep up with the Book.

_‘Tune into Chikaze’s broadcasts,’_ she advised as he peeled away with a nod of thanks. _‘She hasn’t secured them, and the Book gets confused when she tries to tell whether Chikaze’s a threat or not. Or when Chikaze tells her she’s broken. You can see her flinch if you watch, even if she’s firing.’_ He didn’t respond, but at least he knew now if he hadn’t before.

Advice given, she headed upwards. Fate had broken away from the Book’s pursuit and was firing a steady stream of Plasma Lancers into the whirling field of debris, which Yuuno seemed to be wrestling with the Book for control of. The flying chunks of broken building - some spanning two or three floors - were tumbling towards her as often as anyone else, and though she was shattering them with casual swings of the Breaker’s hammer, she didn’t seem to be leaving or just ceasing the spell. Was Chikaze distracting her so much she couldn’t even dodge? No, Nanoha saw, it wasn’t just that. Arf was binding her there; a feed from Fate’s Jewel Seed tinting her magic a darker orange as she renewed each chain as soon as it broke.

“Chrono!” she called as she drew up to him. “I want to try something. If I shoot at the tome and she blocks, do you think you can hide a spell inside my spell that’ll get through?”

The TSAB prodigy stared at her. “That wouldn’t...” he began. Then he paused. “I don’t have any spells that can do that,” was what he settled on instead. “Hide inside someone else’s attack, that is. I could shadow one of yours, but I don’t know how effective that would be.” He frowned, turning back to survey the battle thoughtfully. “If I fired a binding spell...” he said slowly. “Could you... construct a shooting spell around the outside? Instead of me trying to hide a spell inside one of yours.”

Nanoha gave it a few seconds thought. “I’ll give it a go,” she said brightly, trying to sound confident. They were almost there! They just had to work a little bit harder and they could do this, so they couldn’t start giving up now! “Vesta, can you cloak us so we can get closer? Then make the beam look like a normal attack?”

_‘Sure thing!’_

“Right. Let’s go!”

Up close, the noise of the debris field was deafening. The Book had created an aerial death course, with everything from dust to ten-tonne pillars spinning and ricocheting as if in null gravity. No wonder Fate had got out as quickly as she could. Fast as she was, she couldn’t dodge everything, and one unlucky collision in this mess could put her out of the fight instantly. Zest was in the thick of it, using some sort of bubble spell around his spear to send chunks of rubble hurtling at the Book, and for a moment Nanoha missed Linith so hard it hurt. She would be perfect for this sort of thing.

Heck, she wouldn’t have let things get this far in the first place.

“Ready?”

Chrono’s voice snapped her out of it. Nanoha nodded. “Uh... I should probably be right in front of you,” she said. “We’re going to need our spells to be really close together. Can you sort of... cast it from just here?”

She blushed as he awkwardly moved behind her, nudging his Device under her right arm to aim it from just underneath Raising Heart, and mentally promised Vesta the stroking of her life when they got out of this. They’d have probably looked really, really stupid doing this while visible.

_‘It looks pretty stupid doing it invisible, too,’_ Vesta agreed happily. Nanoha mentally crossed out the petting and replaced it with shooting practice, then hurriedly focused on what she was doing.

It was harder than she’d expected. She’d played around with ideas like this before - as something else Arf could do for Fate - but her theories and calculations for that were all the other way around; hiding a spell inside an attack instead of firing an attack around a spell. Doing it like this was... clunky. Awkward. She did her best, warping the structure of two Axel Beams to look like a single spell, but she couldn’t help but wince at how sloppy it was. Precia would be really disappointed if she saw something so inefficient!

“We don’t need it to be effective, we just need it to look threatening,” Chrono snapped, apparently divining her train of thought. “Ready? Fire!”

Nanoha snapped a targeting lock onto the tome, and the pink beam shot out. The wastage at least made it look a lot more powerful than it was, she thought as they held their breath.

_‘Chikaze, distract her!’_ she sent in a rapid burst, and perhaps the girl had been gathering strength to do just that, because her shout resounded out loud enough to cross the battlefield.

_‘Hayate!’_

For the briefest of seconds, the Book hesitated.

The pink beam hit the tome dead on. It didn’t blow it out of the Book’s hand, but it was a near thing - and the failure didn’t matter, because then blue wire was wrapping around it like a net; tightening around the covers and lashing it shut.

[Struggle Bind successful,] Chrono’s Device reported. And for the first time in the battle, the Book genuinely _fell_. Her wings dissolved. The field of rubble dropped like... well, rocks. Even the barrier flickered. It held... but only barely, and the oppressive weight within lightened somewhat. Nanoha could almost have hugged the young Enforcer, if he hadn’t moved away as soon as the spell had struck.

_‘Harlaown to all forces; teleport interdict is down - evac all civilians!’_ Chrono sent on a wide band. _‘Duration of lapse unknown; get them out of here stat!’_ He frowned. “What’s it doing now...?”

The Book’s fall had taken her to the top of a still-standing tower block. Now the tiny figure was surrounded by a white casting triangle again.

“I think... you only shut down the magic she was using through that tome,” Nanoha guessed. “Look, she’s still got the Blade’s sword. Uh, bow. Come on!” Fate and Zest were already diving in, and Nanoha’s heart leapt. With its wide-scale magic crippled like this... they were getting somewhere! They had this fight all but won now!

Spear and scythe were only a stone’s throw away from the Book when she finished her aria and loosed an arrow straight down into the casting sigil at her feet. A white ring rose from it to hover at head height for a moment.

And then it turned into a thousand black arrows aimed outward.

Zest went high. Fate went low. He got the worst of it, as the arrows curved upwards; several slamming into his spear guard and pushing him back. But it was only ten or twelve out of a hundred times that number. The rest fanned out, and Nanoha squeaked as several came her way. But just before they reached her they turned; tied back to their caster by glimmering strings, and began to turn in a huge wheel that covered half the battlefield.

It took only a second or two for her to realise what they were doing. As the nearest one passed by, her Flier Fin wavered for a moment, dipping her lower in the air to be caught on Vesta’s back.

“... mana drain,” she stuttered numbly. A mana pump powerful enough to leech power from _active spells_ , no less, which meant... _‘Everyone! It’s a draining spell! She’s going to break free! Stop her!’_

Unblocked by the building, Zest lunged. The strings flared searingly bright as they transferred their gathered energy; blinding spokes of a thousand-point mandala. The uppermost floor of the building vanished in an explosion.

Something came spinning out of the cloud. The Blade’s bow. Nanoha’s visor automatically magnified the view, and she immediately wished it hadn’t.

There was still most of an arm holding onto it.

But the blow hadn’t come without cost. Zest fell from the building as the Book rose; his spear slipping out of bloodied fingers. Fate darted in to catch him, but his eyes were rolled back in his head and blood was oozing from one corner of his mouth.

“Yuuno knows Physical Heal,” Nanoha said, looking upward as Chrono said several words that Raising Heart refused to translate. “Get him to help Zest. I’ll keep her occupied.”

_‘I’ll peel off, here’_ Vesta said as she rose. _‘Keep her facing you. I’ll take her wings out.’_

Nanoha gave her a sharp nod, and her familiar faded from sight. “Raising Heart?” She murmured, and cracked her knuckles. “Are you ready?”

[We can do it!]

The Book was preparing another spell. Left-handed only now, she’d left the tome hovering in front of her as she traced glyphs in the air in front of her with... were those the Healer’s rings?

“... veil of night,” Nanoha heard. “Blanket the world and snuff out the stars...”

“Oh no you don’t,” Nanoha muttered, charging up a Divine Buster.

A black window formed in front of her enemy. Nanoha hardened her Barrier Jacket instinctively; a jolt of fear running through her. But nothing assailed her as the Book plunged her hand through it. Was she trying to drain Zest? Or Chrono?

“Starless Sky.”

The world darkened. The oppressive weight of the barrier returned. And there was something new to it now. Not just a weight, but a sickening feeling; a tearing and rending and _shredding_ that attacked her spells and ate away at her Barrier Jacket.

[AMF detected, my master. Orders?]

“... cycle to 70%,” Nanoha said, scowling. Oh, she was going to make this stupid book see that what it was doing was wrong! “Come on, Raising Heart. Let’s get her.”

... 

The collective mind of the Mariage was largely emotionless; unmarred by anger or fear. Nevertheless, the current situation was highly negative. The vast majority of its active units had been destroyed. Worse yet, they had been destroyed without achieving any of their objectives. Bar the skeleton guard stationed with the Queen, the scant handful that had escaped the Book’s attentions were all that remained of the once-powerful outbreak.

Five units. Two of them were crippled, and even the mobile ones had suffered serious damage. All five turned to watch the cacophonous battle above as they thought.

At such low strength, the chances of survival were greatly reduced. Projections gave a high likelihood of Bureau forces surviving the Book’s rampage in great enough numbers to conduct a thorough search of nearby worlds for remaining units. Even with the skeleton guard taking stealth measures, this would probably result in the Queen being located and destroyed.

This was unacceptable.

It could be resolved by tilting the balance of the fight further in the Book’s favour. With sufficient losses, the Bureau would be below strength, and the Queen could be hidden again before she was found. The Mariage units would succumb to decay, but so long as the Queen remained safe, their eventual re-emergence would be secure. But the collective mind had nowhere near enough units to make a difference in this fight, even if it could reach it.

At least, not the physical fight.

Five heads turned towards the source of the unencrypted broadcasts directed at the Book. The telepath was interfering with the Book’s actions somehow. Elimination would remove this as a factor, potentially tilting the balance.

Two quick mana-sharing spells drained all usable resources from the crippled bodies, which broke down into burning chemical sludge. Without a second glance at the decomposing corpses, the remaining three Mariage rose.

And moved to attack.

... 

Momoko focused on breathing. In. Out. In. Out. It was easier than thinking at the moment. Whatever had just happened; whatever spell had been cast over the area, it felt like something reaching inside her and _flensing_ her magic like a little ball of razors. Like what the swordswoman had done to her. From the way Chikaze was acting, she felt the same. The young girl was curled up in Momoko’s lap, her breathing shallow and her face deathly pale. The telepathic channel she’d been holding open on sheer willpower had snapped closed as soon as the magic-razor field had come down.

That... was a problem.

_‘Nanoha,’_ Momoko tried. She could, she found, force a message through. It was hard, but possible. _‘What’s happening? What is this?’_

_‘AMF!’_ came the rather terse reply, and the mental presence of her daughter receded so quickly that for a moment Momoko thought the connection had been broken. She was proven wrong as another voice continued in slightly less stressed tones.

_‘It’s an Anti-Magilink Field,’_ explained Vesta, tense and hurried but not in any apparent distress. _‘Rips apart your spells. We’ve seen them before. This one’s really nasty. We’re kinda busy right now stay safe bye!’_

The link closed.

Over in the direction Momoko had last seen the fight going, thunder rumbled. A pink glow appeared somewhere near the top of the barrier and for a moment the city was lit as if by dim sunlight, before the light split into a thousand pieces and started swarming after something. Black lightning crackled through the mass, which was fading a lot faster than Momoko liked.

No help coming from that quarter, then. Pushing the fear for her daughter down, feeling it bubbling under her hands like the lid of a boiling pot that the pressure was mounting within, Momoko turned to her next option.

_‘Yuuno?’_ she sent, focusing on the young blond mage. _‘Yuuno, there’s... there’s a...’_

She trailed off uncertainly. Something was wrong. There was an echo in the channel and it felt dead; unresponsive. _‘Yuuno?’_ she tried again, and sent out a ping.

It bounced instantly. Alert and listening for it, she could feel the shape of whatever it rebounded from. Some sort of suppression ward - an echo chamber boxing them in. Telepathy interdict.

... telepathy interdict that had not been there a moment ago.

“Shiro!” she shouted. “We’re cut off; our communications just went down.” The ring of steel answered her as her husband and children drew their swords, and she bent over Chikaze carefully. “Chikaze? How do you feel? Can you get up?”

Chikaze forced her eyes open, one lagging slightly behind the other. She tried to speak, but managed only a raspy breath. She was still trying, though. Despite her condition, Momoko could feel her struggling to sit upright; pale-faced and blurry-eyed, fighting for every breath. Her face slowly shifted into a frown of concentration, and Momoko felt a flutter of telepathy brush against her mind. She shook her head.

“Don’t,” she ordered. “You’re too weak, and the anti-magic field already hurt you.” She pursed her lips, looking around. Kyouya, Miyuki and Shiro were standing at triangle points around her and the girls, but they were still exposed. “I’m going to try and pick you up, alright? Blink twice if it hurts too much.”

She slid her arms under her legs and back and lifted slowly. Intent on watching the girl’s eyes, she didn’t see the incoming threat until a clash of metal-on-metal rang out through the ruined hospital and she spun to see what had caused it.

And blanched. There were three... _things_ , watching them in a loose pack. They looked human, with visors set into their faces and wearing strange, identical uniforms. But they weren’t. One of them was missing an arm at the shoulder; black ooze dripping slowly out of the torn stump. Another seemed to have had some horrible force scorch most of its face off. It had no visor, no eyes, no features at all - just a horrible charred ruin that somehow didn’t stop it _looking_ at them.

The last one was intact, except for two holes that went clean through its chest. Ooze dripped out of them slowly, but Momoko could see clean through it to the rubble beyond. One hole in its chest was big enough to fit her fist through, and a strange white glow emanated from the cavity. The other, further down, was twice as wide and went through what would have been its guts, had it had any.

It was the last one that had attacked. Its arm was still outstretched, and from the angle of Shiro’s sword, he had parried whatever it had fired. Arisa and Suzuka wordlessly put themselves behind him, and Miyuki started to circle round to join him between the figures and Momoko. Kyouya hung back on the other side of the circle; wary of an ambush from behind.

Very slowly, Momoko lifted Chikaze up, testing her weight. “Shiro,” she said quietly. “We’re going to back away. Can you-”

She stopped. The things were spreading out, splitting up to surround them. They moved with eerie synergy; Blind and Armless going to their sides while Hole approached. Shiro let out a slow whistling breath as he began to give ground, prompting Momoko to start backing away.

“Dad…” Miyuki said hesitantly. “I… don’t think they’re looking at us.”

“They’re not,” he agreed, skipping back closer to Momoko and the girls as Armless tried to dart in and get between them. As soon as he did, Hole and Blind fired – not at him or Momoko, but at the exposed Miyuki. Grey spells slashed out at her and she yelped, ducking one and leaping back to avoid the other. Her sword was up as soon as she touched down again, and a slash and another jump took her back to the relative safety of Shiro’s side.

“Predators,” he said grimly. “They’re after you, Momoko. Or the girls. They’re stalking us, trying to separate us and strike while we’re isolated. Stay together.”

A deep, bitter part of Momoko coiled in her gut and _snarled_. Here she was, being stalked by some… some magical horror monsters, and she felt _useless_. She’d been told by three or four different people that she had a huge potential, but all she had was six months of self-taught magic that she couldn’t even use with her hands busy holding Chikaze. While her daughter, who’d only had a few months more training than her, was up in the sky fighting some… some weapon of mass destruction that Momoko couldn’t protect her from or even fully understand!

It had been stewing inside her for months; that helplessness. It was getting harder and harder to keep from lashing out at something. Well, to hell with being passive and useless _here_. She wanted to _use_ one of those combat spells she’d practiced!

She could hear the girls holding an urgent conversation behind her; something about Chikaze, bad guys and friends. “Suzuka,” she murmured a little louder. “My Device, in my pocket. Could you hand it to me?”

The girls broke off their muttering for a moment, and she felt a small hand dig into her pocket. Then the hard form of the Device met her fingers, and she nodded gratefully. So, to start with… she didn’t exactly have any spells for making things hover beside her, but she knew plenty for moving them around. All she had to do was make a steady upward force holding Chikaze up, and direct the moving-around bits to just keep the girl beside her.

The AMF made it harder – a lot harder, in fact - than she’d expected. But on her third try, she managed to produce a casting circle formed at her feet and gently lift Chikaze out of her arms to float behind her. She kept a mental eye on the spell as she transformed the Device to its staff form. She’d have to be quick if it started to falter.

“I don’t think they’re going to let us just walk away, dear,” she said. “We need to put them down.”

“We’re coming up on the road,” Kyouya said behind her. “Dad, remember when we were testing Mum’s armour?”

A pause. Then Momoko realised what he meant. “I remember,” she said. “Arisa, Suzuka. Closer, please.”

They shuffled closer as she thought quickly, staring down the… magic… golem… things. Holes made another lunge, but this time Shiro was wise to the other two. His foot blurred as he kicked a chunk of brick and concrete at it without dropping his guard, and it broke off its attack in what could almost have been panic to cover the hole in its chest.

If she flared her proto-Barrier Jacket, Momoko decided, she could surround herself and all three children in a protective bubble that would keep them safe from any other lurking enemies. That would give Miyuki, Kyouya and Shiro the freedom to go on the attack - but were the three of them enough to take these things on? The creatures were damaged, true, but…

A whispered “Ready?” “Now!” behind her was all it took to realise she should really have been paying more attention to the girls. The telepathic shout that followed it was loud. Surprisingly loud, in fact - and a fair approximation of Chikaze’s mental voice. It said just one thing.

_‘Hayate!’_

The monsters lunged, and Momoko’s world became a blistering stop-motion of terror and violence.

Her Barrier Jacket flaring; the deep pinkish-red hue flooding the air around her and engulfing the girls.

Kyouya flying past her, his overhead block intercepting Armless’s remaining sword-arm. The blade flowed like honey around his sword; wrenching it out of his grip as it kneed him in the stomach and turned to stab at Miyuki.

Shiro parrying another spell from Holes, then driving it back with a furious assault that filled the area with the crash of metal.

Blind coming straight for her, unerring despite its ruined face, and a shield somehow blooming from her outstretched hand despite the fear locking up all conscious thought.

Kyouya surging upright as Miyuki blocked his stolen sword and grappling Armless from behind. Its leg came up at her, a wickedly barbed thing where its foot should have been, and drops of blood stained the ground as she accepted a hit to the thigh to take its head off.

A cry from Shiro as he went down; a bind around his legs as Holes blurred past him. Blind stabbing through her shield, and the shooting spell that sprang fully formed to mind as if it _wanted_ to be used.

Kyouya screaming as Armless went up in flames and came apart into goo. She caught a shimmer in the air around him as he dropped to the ground and rolled away, but then she was firing, bullet after bullet of mana flashing out. Impossibly, Blind dodged, leaning out of the way of first one, then another, and then…

Shiro, stripping off his shirt in one economical motion and lashing out with it shirt like a whip, coiling around Holes’ head and yanking it back onto his sword, stabbing up through the hole through its chest and into the glow within.

Blind faltered, and four shots hit it in the face and chest like sledgehammers. It lost cohesion as it fell, and hit the ground as a puddle of burning sludge even as Shiro twisted out of the way of Holes’ decomposition.

Silence fell for a second, broken only by a crack of thunder and a brilliant red-gold beam from above. Chemical fumes rose up from the swiftly decomposing corpse-things. The Takamachis caught their breath, then hurried over to Kyouya, who was curled up, screaming faintly. Shiro was first to reach him, and hissed through his teeth. Momoko gasped as she saw what had happened.

“Armour stopped most of it,” her son gritted out, sitting up gingerly. “Slid off without touching. But the heat…”

Miyuki swore colourfully; language that would normally earn her a reprimand. Right now Momoko didn’t have it in her. Most of the front of Kyouya’s shirt was gone, and he sported angry red burns down half his chest and most of his right arm. Shiro inspected them with an experienced eye, and frowned.

“Second degree, I think. We need to clean and wrap them. And _you_ two…” he turned on Arisa and Suzuka, scowling, “can explain _what you were thinking_.”

“It was Chikaze!” Arisa blurted, looking very nearly more intimidated than she had been by the monsters. “Suzuka wanted... I mean, realised they wanted... I mean...”

“The first thing they did was stop our telepathy,” Suzuka offered, sounding only a little calmer. “And I thought... if they just wanted to kill us they could have done that before anyone could have gotten here to help. But they stopped us talking instead.”

“And Chikaze was talking to Hayate!” Arisa cut in. “So they were probably... something the thing in Hayate sent to stop her. And we thought that if we _sounded_ like Chikaze they might panic and try to stop us and then be off-guard for you to...”

“Enough,” Shiro said, sheathing his sword and bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Just... enough. That was reckless and impulsive of you, but...” A sigh. “I suppose it worked. For now, let’s get somewhere defensible.” He glanced up as black rain began to fall from the periodic flashes of light. It was hard to tell from a distance, but the buildings under it looked like they were melting.

“Somewhere defensible and away from that fight,” he corrected himself. “And then hope that there aren’t any more of those things.”

... 

Chrono was fighting defensively, which rankled. But he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.

It wasn’t that he lacked a near-infinite and horrifyingly illegal power source like Takamachi and Testarossa, both of whom were filling the sky with glowing bullets and beams. He was no ridiculous powerhouse like Takamachi, but his stamina was still impressive. Nor was it that he lacked the sheer juggernaut-like stopping power of mages like Zest or Quint. If he chose to go on the attack, he could still output a fair amount of damage. The problem wasn’t even that Durandal, while an incredible piece of technology, wasn’t tuned to him and optimised for his spell arsenal the way his trusty S2U was.

No, he was fighting defensively because unlike _certain people_ , _he_ remembered that the only realistic shot they had at _winning_ this fight was a high-level binding spell from an Eidelon-class Device. And the only other one on the battlefield had a Jewel Seed wired into it and was being used to shoot a Triple Divine Buster at an anti-fortification area bombardment spell.

Chrono dipped low to avoid the explosion as pink beams met black cloud. A brief deluge of fading black motes rained down, and he heard a couple of buildings give way beneath them; their supports eaten away by the magical acid. The cloud was fading, though, so he counted that as a win.

Now, if he had the Book’s timing right, it should be starting a new chant about...

[Stinger Blade: Execution Shift]

... now. Dozens of sparkling blue swords appeared around him and fired, launching themselves at the sigil that was already forming as the Book began to chant. A translucent wave of air pulsed out to stop them, which he’d expected, and the sigil doubled in size, which he hadn’t. Still, he’d planned for defences.

[Stinger Snipe]

One of the swords that had missed both Book and shield curved round behind her; a guided missile whistling towards the back of her head. Its red eyes were focused forward, staring hatefully at... either him or Takamachi, he wasn’t sure. Either way, it was wide-open for...

... the spell to burst against the reinforced Barrier Jacket, knocking the Book’s head forward with the force of the impact but not doing more damage than singeing its hair.

Damn.

But oh well. The intention had never been to hurt it. The Book twisted around, pausing its chant and bringing a hand up to ward away any further shots. And that gave Testarossa enough time to dart in, Familiar in tow, to slash through the sigil and start hammering the Book from behind with her scythe.

That would keep it occupied for a while.

He threw himself forward, already running through new bind permutations. Eternal Coffin took too much time to set up; he needed a stationary target to cast it on. The problem was getting the Book to stay stationary. Because however much time he could buy with clever tactics, the fact was that they were losing.

“Chrono!”

Takamachi swooped up to join him, panting. She was missing a sleeve, which was slowly reforming, and her cape was more char-mark than mana-fabric. “Nice one,” she said, matching his speed. “I think it’s slowing down!”

He shook his head. “It’s not. We are.” She frowned as they dipped to dodge an errant spell, and he glanced over at the fight. It looked like Scrya was moving in to support Testarossa, so he motioned them both down. Landing behind a crumbling and half-melted building, he leaned heavily on the wall. “Let’s take a quick breather. A building won’t stop it, but it’ll make it harder for it to get sensory acquisition, and I think it’s busy. So we have some time to think about things.”

“What’s there to think about?” Vesta said, landing near Takamachi and letting the girl half-fall into her arms. She’d lost her scarf somewhere, and there were several deep gashes in her torso that showed the blood-red mana substrate within. “We keep hitting her until she goes down, right?” Takamachi glared at her, and she hastily corrected herself. “I mean the evil bit! We keep hammering her until it frizzes out and Hayate comes back.”

Chrono shook his head again. “We’re losing this fight. We lost the initiative when Zest went down. Before that, we were stopping it getting any long arias off. With him gone and the AMF up, we can only interrupt two in three, and each big spell it manages makes it harder for us to stop the next.” He shot a hard look at Takamachi. “How many more black rains can you take?”

Her jawline became a solid, stubborn line. “As many as I need to.”

With a great effort of will, Chrono suppressed the urge to thump her over the head with Durandal. It probably wouldn’t knock any sense into her, considering everything else that had clearly failed.

“You can’t and you know it,” he snapped instead, ignoring how his tone made Vesta bristle. “Look, I hate to admit it, but you’re good at doing the impossible. We need to end this. Soon. I don’t think we can pin it down long enough for my Eternal Coffin as we are, and at this rate it’s going to beat us and...”

He glanced around at the melted, shattered buildings. It was enough to make his point. Takamachi followed his gaze, paling as her familiar wrapped her in a tighter hug, and Chrono quietly pressed his thumb and middle finger together for luck.

Her scared look turned thoughtful. Then evaluative. Then excited.

Chrono smirked triumphantly. “What do you have?”

“The barrier,” she said slowly. “It’s stopping us from getting more people... it’s like a photocopy, right?”

He blinked, not sure where this was going, and she gestured with her hands to explain. “Like... there’s the real world,” she held one hand out flat, palm to the ground, “and then the Dimensional Sea above it, and a barrier is like a sort of... copy of a bit of the world that’s shunted upwards a bit. Between realspace and the Sea. That’s why there are copies of buildings and things, but they don’t get broken when you cancel the barrier.” She frowned. “And why cars don’t work, I guess. Not enough detail.”

“... yes,” Chrono said guardedly. “How does this help us with the Book?”

Takamachi nodded. “The bottom of this barrier is reinforced, right? That’s why we can’t get out. But I think... I think the reason it’s so dark and weird is we’re closer to the Dimensional Sea. So if we can’t _beat_ the Book we can push away from Earth!”

Chrono considered this for a moment. “You’re talking about, what, breaking through the top of the barrier?” he asked. “The Sea would wash in and...”

She bit her lip. “No. Why not break the _bottom_ of the barrier? Just above the reinforcement. Then the whole barrier will float up into the Sea - like the Garden of Time! And that gets it away from Earth...”

“And into the fleet’s range,” Chrono finished, a surge of adrenaline hitting him as he saw where she was going. “That might work. How would we break it?”

This seemed to momentarily stump Takamachi, but her familiar raised a hand. “You said that thing was a binding and sealing Device, right?” she said, nodding at Durandal. “So lock down the bottom edge of the Barrier, then have Nanoha shoot it really hard.”

Takamachi had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. Still, absurd as the plan sounded, it was simple enough that it might work. Durandal could lock down the barrier and make it vulnerable, then it was just a matter of hitting it hard enough to break it loose. Not that different in principle from a dimensional quake.

“Fine,” Chrono decided. “We’ll try this. Tell everyone to brace for the impact and _make sure the Book doesn’t hear_. I’m guessing you’ll be using that mana-condensing spell from the Jewel Seed Incident?”

She nodded. “Starlight Breaker. I’m going to give it everything I’ve got! Full power!”

“Aim _away_ from any civilians,” he ordered. “The Sea isn’t literally above us, so you’d be best off pointing it straight upwards. If you can catch the Book in the blast cone, all the better. I’ll make sure the most brittle part of the barrier is the Earthward one. Now warn the others.”

He spun Durandal round and pointed it at the ground, and closed his eyes. “Barb Penetrator,” he whispered, firing a blue dart downward. It winked out of sight before it hit the ground, shifting to hit the teleport interdict, and he gritted his teeth as his intrusion programs got to work. A sealing spell on a _barrier_ that was actively fighting him, tuned so that the interference was greatest along one dimensional axis. This was going to be tricky.

He was vaguely aware of Takamachi sending out a wide-band message, but he was too busy juggling equations and counter-countermeasures to really listen to it. He caught a determined ‘everyone!’ and a ‘keep it distracted’ before having to focus all his attention on the interference pattern. Durandal was really showing its strength; smoothly and quickly doing whatever he asked of it. He almost couldn’t finish forming the spells before it completed them for him. Complexity, apparently, was its speciality.

Beside him, he felt Takamachi back a considerable distance away and start to gather a terrifying amount of power above her. “Countdown,” he spared a flicker of attention to grunt. “Let me know how long.”

“Guys,” Vesta said, a trace of alarm in her voice. “I think we have a problem.”

Chrono didn’t swear, but only because he was trying to wrestle tensors into submission. “Book noticed us?”

_’Hard not to!’_ From the sounds of it, she’d switched to her war form. _’Fate’s stalling it but she can’t buy us forever! Hurry up!’_

“Give me... just a minute...” Come on, come on... there! An interference pattern that forced the barrier to harden, leaving it brittle against enough force. “Takamachi! Now!”

“Ten more seconds!” she yelled. This time Chrono did swear. He couldn’t break off his assault on the barrier to fight a holding action. The spell was already trying to adapt. He cracked an eye open and glanced up to see a dark-winged monstrosity descending; wreathed in green chains and lightning. He pushed all his feelings, all his hatred for that thing away. The best revenge was _beating_ it and he couldn’t make a single mistake.

“Five!” Takamachi yelled. The Book was _screaming_ , he realised; motes of light pouring from it like a swarm of fireflies.

“Four!” The pink light of the mass above her was blinding; a sphere of turbulent mana that burned like it was drenched in oil and must have been a dozen metres across at least. The nine year old was nearly invisible amidst the light of her magic. Unlike her casting six months ago, the edges of this spell dissolved into a fuzzy mist of mana so dense Chrono could taste it in the air and feel it against his skin. He could see the Jewel Seed in her Device; hear the whine of the ancient Lost Logia as it fed her an endless supply of mana to counteract what she was losing to the AMF.

“Three!” The Book was diving straight towards them, attack spells blazing in its wake, the cloud of light-motes rushing down ahead of it. There was nothing he could do now; it was just a matter of who reached their goal first.

“Two!” His programs would last less than a second without his upkeep. At best, if he acted as fast as he could and pulled it off perfectly, he could manage one spell.

“One!” It would have to be the right one, then.

“Starlight Breaker!”

And light struck like a tidal wave.

... 

Thought returned. So did sensation. She was cradled in someone’s arms, and they were crying.

“... stupid stupid dumb! Reckless idiot stupid stupid bad!”

Ah. Vesta. That would explain the crying. Nanoha cracked an eye open. Buildings loomed above her – they must still be down at street level – and her familiar was looking down at her, tears trickling down her cheeks. Her hair was singed, and she was missing both sleeves and much of her skirt, but she seemed mostly unharmed by... whatever had happened.

“ _Idiot!_ ” she repeated emphatically, and hugged Nanoha hard enough to make her ribs creak. “It nearly got you! I barely broke the illusion! _Don’t ever do that again!_ ”

“What...” Nanoha coughed. “What happened?”

Vesta growled deep in her throat, then sniffed and blinked the tears away. “Chrono’s gone. The Book sort of... ate him, I think. But you got the spell off. The whole barrier wrenched loose. It was like a dimensional quake.”

“Ate him?” Nanoha asked, voice quavering. Her hands shook, and she only belatedly realised she had them wrapped around Raising Heart. It was missing a cooling vent, and one of the tines was partly melted. The metal of her gloves was charred and the mana-fabric had been seared away entirely. She could feel blisters all along her fingers against the cool metal of the shaft.

Weakly, Vesta shifted her into one arm and held up another Device. It was Chrono’s. “He... he threw it to me,” she said softly, trembling. If she had been in her kitten form, her fur would have been fluffed out. “He pulled us away with one of his cables. He was shouting that we couldn’t let it eat the Jewel Seed and then it w-went for him and… and then he… he threw it to me just as it touched him and then he just... he just dissolved. Into light.”

A lump formed in Nanoha’s throat. She didn’t _like_ the young Enforcer very much, but he was a good person. They fought well together, complementing each other’s strengths, and he hadn’t hesitated to make sure the civilians were safe before anything else when the interdict had gone down.

That he’d sacrificed himself for her...

She rubbed a sleeve across her eyes and shifted out of Vesta’s grip to stand on her own two feet.

“If it ate him, he’s still in there,” she said, willing it to be true. “So we’ll just beat the Book up twice as hard and get him back!”

“Right,” nodded Vesta fiercely. “Uh. How?”

“We’ll find a way,” Nanoha declared. She squared her jaw. “Let’s find the Book and beat it!”

This did not prove difficult. There were several buildings missing from around Nanoha’s firing point, and the street was still glowing and half-molten from the backlash. The Book was trying to get to her feet, hindered by her missing arm. Two of her four wings were broken beyond repair, dissolving back into mana even as Nanoha watched. Her skin was flaking away in places and regrowing in a charred black colour, and something that looked an awful lot like blood was dripping from the burns that covered half of her face.

Staring at the damage she’d done, Nanoha felt sick. She hadn’t... she hadn’t meant to _hurt_ her. Not like this. Not... not with crippling burns or... or whatever had happened to the Book’s poor face. She’d just wanted her to _stop_. To... to be caught higher up and knocked out. A choked sob of horror forced its way up and out of her throat.

The slumped and bleeding figure changed in an instant. The exhausted kneeling posture of someone unable to force themselves up onto both feet became a tense three-point crouch, and the hanging head whipped towards the source of the sound. From under a veil of white hair, a single blood-red eye glared out at Nanoha with mad fury. Blood dripped from the Book’s fingers as her hand rose.

“Shatter, world, and cast out the enemy,” she rasped. Paralysed, Nanoha could only stare as Vesta tried to drag her away. When that failed, the cat-familiar snarled in frustration and put herself solidly in front of her mistress. The Book didn’t seem to notice as she continued, growing louder and wilder as she chanted. “Banish them to a realm of eternal oblivion and grant them no respite! Li-”

Green light slammed down like a hammer, cutting off the last few words and forcing her hand down to the ground. The surface of the street _buckled_ beneath it, light refracting oddly as if through splintered glass. A colour that wasn’t blossomed in the warped space as the tarmac warped. The details faded as the cracks devoured light, hurting the eyes with impossible hues.

Nanoha had seen that un-colour before. Six months ago. Leaking out of the rifts into Imaginary Space.

And then it was gone. With an audible _crack_ , the breach closed, and there was a car-sized chunk missing from the ground just beyond the Book’s outstretched finger. The things forcing her down weren’t chains, they were _blocks_ ; huge solid structures of mana that would have weighed tonnes if they’d been metal; punching into the ground and trapping her limbs and torso inside stocks that outmassed her three times over. A Midchildan binding circle dropped down around her and Nanoha’s knees buckled. Even right at the fringes, it felt like gravity had suddenly tripled. Another smaller one dropped from the sky to hover a few inches above it – and then another within that, and another within that. It wasn’t until _five_ circles had formed around her, each smaller and brighter than the last, that the assault stopped.

Somehow, incredibly, the Book was still struggling. She managed to raise her head a few inches – enough for Nanoha to see the emerald gag that had covered her mouth. But no further.

Grunting with the effort, Vesta hefted Nanoha into her arms and backed out of the widest circle. Stepping outside it felt like suddenly launching into flight, and Nanoha’s eyes naturally tracked upwards.

Yuuno Scrya, Fate Testarossa and Arf hung in the air above her, the former panting with effort. Nanoha could see the light of Bardiche’s Jewel Seed through the casing as Fate funnelled it through a mana-sharing spell. It had shifted colour, she realised. It had been a reddish shade earlier; halfway between its original purple and Fate’s electric gold. Now it was almost as close to Fate’s colour as Nanoha’s Seed was to hers.

The trio landed, and Arf split off from the other two to hurry over to Nanoha. From the looks of things, both Yuuno and Fate wanted to follow, but instead they stayed put, pacing around the edge of the binding circle until they were out of the Book’s sightline.

“Nanoha! Vesta!” Arf gasped as she reached them. “Are you alright? Did it hurt you?”

“We’re fine,” Nanoha reassured her, ignoring the sceptical look she got in return. “Now! Time to save Chrono and Hayate! How do we get them out?”

Arf looked at her strangely. “Why are you asking me that?” she asked. “I’m not the one with the plan.”

“Does it _matter_ whose plan it is?” Nanoha snapped, frustrated. “Just tell me what it is!”

Now Arf was looking confused. After a moment, comprehension seemed to dawn. “Wait a minute,” she said slowly. “She... she didn’t tell you yet?”

“ _Who_ didn’t tell me _what?_ ”

And a new voice intruded.

_‘That, my dear,’_ it said, _‘would be me.’_

Nanoha’s mouth fell open. Heck, Nanoha almost fell _over_. Because that voice. She knew that voice. She’d said goodbye to that voice, in tears... was it only the day before? If that?

_‘... Precia?’_ she breathed.

_‘I apologise for waiting to contact you, Nanoha.’_ Precia’s voice sounded tired, but... well, she was awake to _be_ tired. Had... had Jail managed to save her? _‘I didn’t want to distract you at a crucial moment, not when you were so close to the Book of Darkness. Now, however, we have time to talk freely.’_

_‘How... where are... when did you...’_ Nanoha stammered, questions falling out so fast they tripped over her tongue. _‘You’re... but Linith...’_

She looked down, her heart sinking, and Vesta embraced her from behind. _‘She... she’s really gone, isn’t she?’_

_‘Yes.’_ Precia’s tone was as gentle as she could make it, but she said it solemnly and without hesitation. _‘Yes, I’m afraid so. She sacrificed herself to ease the burden on my Linker Core, and our mutual friend managed to bolster my system. I had to force him to give me the medicine I wanted, but I can be persuasive when I have to.’_ She paused. _‘I have a day or so before I fall into another coma – but it looks like I may wake up from that one, in time.’_

_‘But... how did you get here? Where are you?’_ Nanoha paled, looking around. _‘You’re not in here, are you? It’s dangerous!’_

Precia laughed. _‘No, child. No, I am...’_ She paused. _‘You managed to disconnect the barrier from Earth – well done, by the way. That brought the interdict down to a level that can be breached by scrying and amplified telepathy. I am onboard a ship just outside the realspace bubble.’_

Another, longer pause.

_‘... a Bureau ship.’_

Nanoha turned sheet white and brought Raising Heart up protectively. _‘They caught you? Alicia! Is she-’_

_‘Nanoha!’_ Nanoha shut up. _‘Alicia is safe with... our mutual friend. I came to the Bureau willingly – they’re helping me because they need me. They cannot afford to refuse when the Book is here.’_ She chuckled mirthlessly. _‘If all goes to plan, they might even give me a medal. Though I doubt it. Regardless, Alicia will be safe until I can convince them that she is no threat – and that they need not take action against her. The suppression of the Jewel Seed is sound; as long as I can actually make my case, I can force them to accept that much. And they_ will _let me make my case.’_

_‘How do you know, though?’_ Nanoha looked over at Yuuno and Fate, who... well, Fate in particular seemed overjoyed. She was _beaming_. Well, alright, she was smiling very slightly as she paced around the edge of the binding circle and spoke to Yuuno. But for fight-mode Fate, that was _like_ beaming. Still, there was no guarantee that she wasn’t so happy about her mother being _alive_ that she’d forgotten to think about... about the long-term stuff. And things. _‘What if they don’t give you a chance; what if they just lock you up and then follow us when we go to pick Alicia up at... at our friend’s place?’_

_‘Some will say they should,’_ Precia agreed. _‘But they won’t. They will have to listen to my claims of suppressing a Lost Logia, you see. Because I will have demonstrated it in front of them, in terms they cannot deny.’_

_‘... you’re going to use the Jewel Seeds in Raising Heart and Bardiche?’_ Nanoha asked, confused. _‘But... they’d still have to listen for you to-’_

_‘No, my dear,’_ Precia cut her off. And suddenly Nanoha felt a lot better about this, because she could _hear_ the triumphant smirk in Precia’s voice. It was the same note of triumph that she’d had when she’d explained how she’d revived Alicia in the first place. _‘Not the Jewel Seeds.’_

_‘I will present them with the Book of Darkness. Sealed, suppressed – and harmless.’_

... 

“You have to stop, _please_ , they’re _harmless!_ ”

The virtual space at the heart of the Book of Darkness was no longer calm and contented. The starry sky was rent by wide swathes of sucking blackness that seemed to pulse like veins, and there was a chill to the air. Hayate spun her wheels again in a desperate attempt to get closer to the Book, but the construct stepped back with every roll forward to maintain the space between them. “Please!” she begged. “They won’t hurt you if you stop fighting, just _stop!_ I’m not in danger!”

“... but you are.” The Book looked very old, suddenly. And still strangely familiar in a way that was niggling at Hayate like a puzzle she ought to know the answer to. “Once, I was harmless,” she said. “Then, I was the Tome of the Night Sky. Now I am cursed; wrapped in a mantle of darkness and suffering that suits this fallen era. I apologise, Lady Hayate. I have brought only pain upon you.”

“I don’t...” Hayate stuttered, “I don’t understand.”

“The curse I carry is born by each of my masters in turn,” the Book said. She was wavering. Her arm was fading in and out of view like it was barely there. “It saps at their strength like a hungry worm until I am woken. It has been eating into your body for years.” Tears gathered in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, and her eyes creased in grief. “My heart is bound to those of my Knights, and so I cannot forgive myself... for being the one who is killing you.”

“That...” Hayate’s breathing sped up again and her hands went to her wheels instinctively. “So… so wait a minute, you’re saying _you_ paralysed me? That’s why I’m like this? You knew?” She sat straighter, eyes wide, staring down at her legs. “I figured… we figured it was… but you _knew_ , and… and why didn’t you stop it, or tell me, or… or _something!_ ”

“… Lady Hayate…”

Startled, she looked up. There were tears glinting against the Book’s cheeks, and she suddenly realised why they seemed so familiar.

“You look like me,” she whispered.

The Book didn’t seem to hear her. She was either heartbroken or doing a very good impression of it, because her eyes and tears spoke volumes that her face couldn’t hide. “Lady Hayate, I am sorry. So sorry. So shamed. This era… it is so dark. So lightless. I have lost the stars, and it is only now in waking that I remember they once were.” She swayed forward, her tears spilling down to her chin and falling in tiny droplets that burst against Hayate’s hands. “The curse cannot be broken. The world cannot be saved. Darkness will fall. I have tried… I have tried. So many times. I am sorry, Lady Hayate, that you were born in such a cruel time. But though your foes are doomed, though they cannot stop the me without... you will not...”

“No... no, listen to me!” Hayate reached up and grabbed her, pulling her down to her knees. “Listen, just... they’re not foes, okay? And the illness... the illness is bad. But... but maybe we can find a way round it now we know what it is! You just... they can help us, they’re _trying_ to help us, you just have to listen! Think of Shamal and Signum and Vita and Zafira! You said they’re close to your heart - they knew not everything was trying to hurt us!”

For a moment - just a moment - she thought the Book was wavering. But then bleak despair poured down on her again.

“They try to kill us as we speak,” she said, her voice hollow. “The me without can sense it. The hatred and hostility from every angle. There is no escape. There is no aid. There will be no more _listening_. They cannot escape, and they cannot prevail.” Scars bloomed on her face, her eye fading into a matte black abyss as well. The pulsing veins of blackness were crawling closer; dropping down from the sky, crawling across the expanse towards them. Something was _wrong_ here - horribly, unnaturally wrong - but Hayate didn’t know what it was and she lacked the time to work out how to fix it.

Which meant...

“... fine.” Hayate hadn’t wanted to resort to her last idea. But she was desperate. “Fine then! You called me mistress! Right now, I _am_ your mistress. So you have to listen to what I say. You can’t ignore me! And I’m telling you to stop fighting them! Stop fighting and bring back my knights and let me out of here!”

The Book reared back. “That would cause your death, Lady Hayate. I cannot follow such a command.” She paused. “I _will_ not.”

“Well I’m not giving you a choice!” Hayate met her gaze full on. The air between them solidified as a silent battle of wills erupted.

“I said,” Hayate gritted out. “To bring back my knights. And to let me out.” Her eyes flashed blue fire. “And that was an _order_ , Book of Darkness.”

... 

_‘I realised early on that we might be dealing with the true Book of Darkness, and began to plan for that eventuality,’_ Precia explained. _‘My work on a binding spell that could seal it was nearly complete when... well, when I succumbed. My experience with the Jewel Seeds served me well in that regard, and when I found out that the Wolkenritter had launched a major attack, I contacted the Bureau.’_

_‘And it will work?’_ Nanoha asked, glancing over at where the Book still struggled against her restraints. _‘You’re sure about that?’_

Precia sniffed. _‘The spell is inefficient, slow, prohibitively expensive to cast and will need maintenance once applied, if not an entirely new seal put in place under better conditions by the Bureau. I was rushed for time in making it, so it’s abominably sloppy work by any standards. But I know spellcrafting, and I know Lost Logia at least as well as anyone else alive. It will work, Nanoha, as long as you can cast it.’_

She continued before Nanoha could celebrate. _‘That, however, will be difficult. The inefficiencies in the spell mean it will take a great deal of power to cast. If only I was well… but I am not. The Book will need to be reduced to a passive state in which it cannot resist the seal, and even then you shouldn’t try casting without at least three Eidelon-class or equivalent Devices.’_

_‘Um…’_

Precia sighed. _‘You need to shoot it until it passes out first. Then you, Fate and the Harlaown boy need to seal it in unison.’_

The bottom dropped out of Nanoha’s stomach.

_‘Chrono… Chrono is g-gone, though,’_ she whispered. _‘The… the Book ate him. He saved me.’_

A long, horrible silence descended. Then Nanoha’s jaw firmed, and she closed her hand around the card in Vesta’s fist. _‘It didn’t get his Device, though,’_ she said. _‘Send me the spell. I’ll work it out.’_

_‘Nanoha!’_ Precia sounded alarmed. _‘You cannot cast two components of the spell at once! It will either fail or kill you – or both!’_

_‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to,’_ Nanoha reassured her. _‘Send me the spell.’_ She jutted out her chin. _‘I have a plan.’_

Three minutes later, she was hovering above the old hospital, scanning for heat signatures. She found Arisa, Suzuka and Chikaze’s quickly and swooped down to where they were hiding, landing beside the remains of a house that had lost most of its walls but still had an intact cellar.

“Suzuka,” she called as she dropped down past the ladder, “Aris- ahhh!”

The sword stopped a few centimetres away from… well, bouncing off her Barrier Jacket, probably, but it had been aimed to take her head off. She waited for her heart rate and breathing to settle, then gave her father a reproachful look. “Papa, it’s me! And… and how are you even down here? I didn’t see you on my thermal scan!”

Shiro looked like he was waiting for his own heartbeat to slow down from the near miss, but he managed a faint smirk. “Nice to see you still have a few things yet to learn,” he teased. “I’ll show you some other time. Is it over?”

“Ah?” Nanoha perked up with interest. So there was some sort of… heat signature-shielding thing in Fuwa style? How did _that_ work? Maybe a simple illusion… wait, wait, no, that wasn’t what she was here for! Later!

“Ah, no!” she said. “Not quite. That’s why I’m here. We need Mama’s help.”

“Me?” Momoko spoke up, rising from where she was huddled with Miyuki, Kyouya and the girls. “How could I help in all of this?”

Nanoha took a deep breath, drawing on all her certainty that this _would_ work, and stuck a hand in her pocket. “With this,” she said.

And held out the gleaming white-and-blue form of Durandal.

Momoko’s eyes widened. Then narrowed. And then, slowly, she smiled. “I think I would like that very much, darling,’ she said. “What do I need to do?”

Five minutes and a hurried explanation later, they were back at the binding circle. Which wasn’t looking so good. Nanoha frowned at the tiny shape amidst the huge green blocks.

“Yuuno,” she said slowly. “Is it me, or… are there cracks in the block holding its arm down?”

“It’s not just you.” Slumped on a bench that had miraculously survived the destruction all around them, Yuuno wasn’t looking well. “It’s eating away at my barriers from the inside. And once you start casting and Fate stops feeding me mana, I’m not going to be able to repair them as fast as it can break them down. You’ll have maybe ten seconds before it rips its way free.”

Fate’s lips pursed. “Enough time to charge a bombardment spell. We need to knock it out in one shot, then. That means all firing at the same time; maximum power.”

Yuuno nodded tiredly. “I’ll try to… I don’t know, hook it in another bind once it goes down.” He paused. “If it goes down.”

“ _When_ it goes down,” Nanoha corrected. “Mama? Can you manage the spells?”

“Hmm?” Momoko looked up from where she was, apparently, deep in communion with Durandal. She’d donned a proper Barrier Jacket with the Device’s help; a simple blue coat with an empty sword belt slung around her hips and a fair approximation of her favourite walking boots. “I… think so. The bombardment, definitely – I can see why you love this so much, Nanoha, the equations are… are beautiful.” She grinned, and Nanoha’s heart leapt at the sight. Flushed with adrenaline and enthusiastic over newfound knowledge, her mother’s familiar face looked radiant. Like a guardian angel. Or, Nanoha thought with some amusement, a Belkan saint.

“It’s this second part; the sealing, that I’m worried about,” she added, frowning. “The spellwork is far more complex.”

Nanoha nodded. The sealing spell was a gorgeous piece of work – for all Precia’s claims that it was sloppy and rushed, there was still an elegance in every line that Nanoha couldn’t help but envy, and large elements that she could only fumble at understanding. But it _was_ inefficient. And it would be difficult to cast, especially for a relative beginner like her mother.

“Don’t worry,” she promised, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. “We’ll make it work. Raising Heart, help explain it to Mama! You were good with me when I was a beginner, so you’ll be good with her.”

[Yes, my master.]

Despite her conviction, it took time to read through the sealing spell; precious minutes slipping away as Yuuno fought a silent battle to keep the Book contained. By the time they were ready, he was sheet white and his hands were trembling. The stench of ozone hung heavy in the air beneath the baleful golden glow of Fate’s Jewel Seed, and a heat haze seemed to cling to them from the energy losses. Fate hadn’t said a word and held Bardiche as firmly as ever, but Nanoha was fairly sure that the metal around the Jewel Seed’s housing was glowing a dull red.

“Are we ready?” Arf asked briskly, to a round of short nods. “Right. If things go wrong and it does get free; Yuuno’ll try and seal it while we tackle it in war form. That should buy you at least a little time.”

“And mistress, let’s pretend we’ve already had this argument and I won,” Vesta added before Nanoha could object. “It’s weaker than it was, and you three won’t be able to raise a shield. We’re the best shot at stopping it.”

“Agreed,” said Fate. Nanoha shot her a betrayed look, which she returned with implacable calm. “Positions.”

Grumbling, Nanoha took point to the Book’s left. Fate and Yuuno stood at its right, and Momoko completed the triangle directly behind it.

_‘Mother,’_ she sent. _‘We’re ready.’_

_‘Good luck.’_ Precia’s voice was little more than a whisper.

Inside the circle, the blocks holding the Book down were disintegrating faster and faster. Her head was free, and she stared at Nanoha with manic hatred, ignoring the others entirely. Four of Yuuno’s gravity seals were gone, and wide cracks were spreading through the block that trapped her one arm. Black rot glowed within them, pushing back against his attempts to patch the holes.

Now that Nanoha could see her closer, the Book’s face was a ruin. Her right eye and half her face was simply gone. The black under-structure of a mana construct boiling where once had been skin. She didn’t scream, but somehow the low stream of muttering she kept up was worse. Nanoha didn’t know what she was saying, and didn’t want to. Curses, perhaps, in languages so old that nobody remembered they had ever been, and sounds no human voicebox could ever produce. Or nasty old spells from worlds that the Book of Darkness had destroyed.

“Raising Heart,” Nanoha whispered. “You’re hurt. How much output can you take?”

[Safe limit is 77% of standard, my master.]

She nodded. “Then cycle to 80%. I’ll get you the best maintenance and repair I can find right after we‘re done.”

[Alright, my master. Let’s do it!]

Behind the terrible spectacle the Lost Logia made, Momoko raised a hand and counted down on her fingers. Five. Four. Three. Two.

One.

“Now!”

Fate shifted the power away from Yuuno, and the reaction was instant. He stumbled backward, crying out as a wave of black tendrils exploded out from the Book, piercing the last few blocks holding it down, the gravity seals and slamming into the outer dome with a crash. The green wall fractured – but held.

Stymied, the tendrils retreated. But they didn’t disappear. They coiled and compressed into a tight ball around the Book; like a nest of writhing snakes with barbed tips protruding in every direction. Looking at it, Nanoha couldn’t help but think of… building pressure. Like taking a deep breath before pushing hard.

“Full power, everyone!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”

Two Jewel Seeds spun, filling the air with mana. Three auras flared. Three Devices levelled.

“Divine Buster!”

“Thunder Smasher!”

“Divine Buster!”

Yuuno dropped the dome.

The black mass of tendrils rushing out met three bombardment spells rushing in. For a split second they were visible as dark outlines in the light; then they were gone. The Book rose like a demon out of hell, her tome rising above her upheld hand, but even the defences of a Lost Logia weren’t fast enough to stop the assault. The three beams – one pink, one red, one gold – struck her in unison, and she vanished in the explosion. Uncontained by any barrier or shield, fed and gorged on mana, the ball of energy grew – and grew, and grew. It was all Nanoha could do to reinforce her Barrier Jacket and hunker down as the edge swept closer, trusting in the beam she was firing to turn the worst of it aside. She felt something light hit her in the back – Vesta’s kitten form, holding on and using her as a shield against the storm. Yuuno had been near Fate, hadn’t he? Arf... where had Arf been? Guarding her mother?

_‘Ready on the seal!’_

Fate’s voice pierced the maelstrom and Nanoha nodded. There was no time to spare for worrying. If the Book hadn’t gone down yet, it wasn’t going to – and they needed to seal it while they still had the strength.

_‘Now!’_

It began as an almost floral bloom in front of her. Though her bombardment spell was over, the noise and light hadn’t abated. The energies she, Fate and Momoko had unleashed were feeding off each other, clashing and rebounding and setting the mana-saturated air ablaze in a mana-storm that had swallowed half the city block.

But where before the heat had been scorching her eyebrows and the wind had been whipping her hair back; prevented from hurting her only by her Barrier Jacket and the outpouring of power going in the opposite direction, now the air was calm and still. Traced out in front of her in pink light was something utterly unlike her usual casting circles. Oh, there were Midchildan elements in it, yes. But the outer edge of the central circle was broken, radiating out in curving lines and chains of glyphs. It grew as it drew in power, both from her and from around it. The shape it took was asymmetrical; growing further up and to the right, and she didn’t even recognise the script in parts of it.

Nanoha chanted the words that Raising Heart prompted her with, ran through the calculations and fed the growing magic where it needed to go. But despite how smoothly and easily it came, she knew she wasn’t doing anything special here. Not compared to the person who’d written it. Nanoha could piece together perhaps a fifth of the sealing spell’s workings, and recognised less than a third of the languages it was written in; blended together by a master’s hand.

Despite the roar of the storm, the power running through her Device, the adrenaline singing in her veins and the aches and pains of the fight... all she could feel was humbled.

The blooming shapes spread out further, folding out from one another like the petals of a flower. Out of the corners of her eyes, Nanoha saw her bright pink meet Momoko’s cherry-pink hue to the right and Fate’s electric gold on her left. A ring – no, a dome, capped by the tri-colour casting circle that spread out across the ground in front of her. It began to contract...

... and met resistance.

The Book’s will was _furious_. Through the half-completed binding, Nanoha felt her rage and scream, throwing herself against the closing chains. It felt like every muscle in her body cramping at the same time as someone punched her in the stomach, and she screamed in shock and pain as it hit.

_‘Don’t stop!’_ Fate’s voice lashed out. Nanoha could feel her will as well, and Momoko’s. _‘Keep going! Don’t... don’t let it break free!’_

Gritting her teeth, Nanoha drew upon reserves of will she hadn’t even known she had, and began to force their binding inward, one step at a time. Memories and sensations flickered through her mind and time took on an abstract, distant quality as they struggled for every inch. It was hard. But she knew where to look for what she needed.

The long months her papa had taken to recover from his wounds when she was just a child. Optimism and the patience to see things through.

Her mother’s fierce willingness to help, even in the face of a strange and dangerous new world. Determination, and a refusal to be cowed.

Precia’s brilliance and love for her daughter, fighting her illness to spend time with Alicia. Compassion, and hope for the future.

Fate’s laser focus and skill, the way she’d forgiven Yuuno and helped him when it really mattered. Friendship, and the knowledge of things worth fighting for.

Vesta’s weight on her back; her familiar refusing to leave her even in a struggle that risked their lives. Loyalty, and the responsibility to protect and care for others.

There was one more thing they needed, though. Just one – but one she couldn’t supply on her own.

But she didn’t need to. It came from another source.

_‘Hayate,’_ Chikaze’s voice whispered; a zephyr in the middle of a hurricane. It shouldn’t have been audible at all through all the noise and chaos, but somehow it reached them nonetheless. _‘Hayate, please. Come back.’_

And the Book’s resistance... stopped.

The flower-like dome rushed in to fill the gap, compressing the last energies of the mana-storm that had been caught within it down until they formed a sphere too bright to look at. The layer of the seal darkened; layered and folded and twisted in on itself until the delicate lines and patterns were a solid mass of glyph upon symbol upon number upon shape. For a second Nanoha thought she could pick out every last one; backlit by the light within and overlaid on top of each other into a new pattern, the final meta-spell formed from the completed union of all the others.

And then it dissolved, piece by piece, fading inward and leaving nothing but the scorched and melted circle on which the struggle had ended. Nanoha fell to her knees as the force she’d been pushing against vanished, Raising Heart falling from a burnt and blistered hand. She was barely aware of Vesta catching her, or of Momoko’s own collapse off to one side.

Six bodies were left where the sealing spell had been. Four knights, armed and armoured, their terrible wounds healed and their faces calm in well-earned rest.

A young boy, younger in sleep than awake, his hand sleepily curled around a Device that wasn’t there.

And a girl. Her legs shifted as she yawned, her eyes open for a moment before fluttering closed. She rolled over and met the bulk of one of her knights; clustered around her protectively even in sleep. The movement was enough to turn her face towards Nanoha as consciousness began to fade.

She was smiling.

... 

THE EPILOGUE OF POWER GAMES  
WILL BE POSTED IN ONE WEEK  
TO CONCLUDE THE FINALE


	12. Epilogue

The hearings took months. Winter had come and gone - and Nanoha had been put through several extremely awkward explanations to her friends and loved ones - before any kind of resolution was reached.

But now, at last, they were over. Now she was nervously sitting at home, swinging her legs and fretting. Her parents had insisted she dress up nicely for this, but her smart clothes weren’t a Jacket and felt stiff and uncomfortable. She was too nervous even to practice. Staring out the back window, she watched a black cat walk across the garden, sniffing. She hoped the poor thing left before Vesta decided to scare it off from ‘her’ territory.

Then came the knock she’d been waiting for. Nanoha rushed to answer it, nearly tripping over Vesta as the kitten twined around her ankles and meowed. Shushing her, Nanoha took a moment to compose herself for the TSAB official that she’d been told would be calling.

The door swung open, and she gave a happy cry of delight at who was behind it.

“Miss Quint!”

“Nanoha,” Quint grinned in return. She wore a neat, dark blue uniform that looked vaguely military but not too out of place for Earth. Her arm, Nanoha was glad to see, bore no signs of the terrible injury she’d taken in the fight against the Breaker. “I got to come give you the good news. And don’t worry, it is good news, mostly. Can I come in?”

“Of course! Here, let me get you a drink...”

Once Quint was settled on the sofa with an orange juice in hand, Nanoha perched opposite her and bit her lip. Vesta jumped into her lap, and she petted her familiar absently to occupy her hands. The older woman chuckled.

“Relax. Both of you are strung as tight as wire. I promise I won’t bite. Like I said, it’s good news, mostly.”

“O-okay.” Despite the reassurance, Nanoha’s nerves jangled. “So, um. What happened? Were you involved a lot?”

Quint stretched languidly. “Yes. I testified last week - in your favour, in case you were wondering. And then spent a few days tied up in paperwork and a few more getting here in a very cramped shuttle. There’s a fair bit of bickering to still be decided, and a lot more paperwork, but the basics are more or less settled. Are your parents around?”

Nanoha shook her head. “They wanted to be, but there was a cake disaster at the bakery, and Saturday is the busiest day of the week. Mama went in to handle it and Papa tagged along to help.”

“Hmm. Well, I’ll take them through it later, but I’ll give it to you two first.” She drained the rest of her cup and set it down, then cleared her throat and assumed a more formal bearing. “Nanoha Takamachi, do you recognise the authority of the Time-Space Administration Bureau to hold you accountable under its laws?”

Nanoha traded a dubious glance with Vesta. “Uh... do I say yes to that?”

“It would help,” Quint nodded. “It makes it tricky for us to make legal decisions about you if you refuse to acknowledge our laws. Which technically you can, but that would mean we’d respond to you as an outlaw and it’d also mean you’d be giving up the laws that protect you. Of which there are quite a few. So I’d go with a yes.”

“... then yes,” said Nanoha after a moment’s thought. “I knew what I was getting into when I started this, and I caused you a lot of trouble, even if it all worked out in the end.” She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin determinedly. “I’m ready to take responsibility for my actions,” she said clearly and carefully.

Quint shook her head, smiling. “Kid, someday you are going to make an amazing officer, if you decide to go that way. Alright then. Given your status as a minor, as well as a native of a magicless and dimension-blind world, the Bureau has ruled that many of your crimes were committed out of well-meaning ignorance, and that you can’t be blamed for them.

“Additionally, despite the incident at the Garden of Time,” she paused to let Nanoha wince, then continued “... several Bureau officers and multiple Device logs show that you took great care to avoid harm during the Jewel Seed Incident. Along with the fact that you helped seal the Book of Darkness, and the peaceful intentions you showed on Schzenais – we went and checked up on your time there – the Bureau has determined that there was no malice behind your actions and that you pose no risk of future criminal activity. You will be placed under a light Limiter that reduces you to A-rank until the age of fourteen, at which time you can take a psychological evaluation to have it lifted.

“And,” she added, the formal demeanour falling away as Nanoha processed that, “you can take lessons in magic and Dimensional Space until that time. I argued pretty hard for you to be allowed to keep flying, so don’t let me down, okay?”

“Oh, thank you!” Nanoha lunged forward and hugged her. “Thank you thank you thank you! I was worried... so I can still fly? I mean, as long as I keep it quite and don’t get spotted?”

Quint hugged her back. “You can.”

“Thank you so much!” Nanoha breathed out slowly, then sat back on her couch. “What about Fate?”

“Fate will get something very similar – her position as a minor raised solely by Precia means she can’t be held responsible for many of her actions, and she’s shown good faith and noble intentions. Precia will be given a much stronger Limiter, and the whole family will be living in a carefully monitored exile away from access to magical infrastructure.” She smiled ruefully. “Precia managed to convince the Bureau that all she wants to do is spend the rest of her days with her children, and the information she volunteered to help clean up some of our internal corruption helped her case, but she was asleep for long enough that while she couldn’t plead her case, certain people made sure she wouldn’t be living anywhere she could get in touch with any of her contacts.”

“Where will they go?” Nanoha asked quietly, her shoulders drooping. Quint smirked.

“You might have heard of it. It’s this magic-blind, dimension-blind little world that we’re already going to be keeping a very sharp eye on, well away from any magic centres that might stress Precia’s system, and I’m told,” she winked, “that it has at least one young lady there who’ll keep them on the straight and narrow.”

Nanoha’s eyes widened. “You... you mean it? They’ll be... here?”

“We’ve found a house for them nearby. We’ll be checking in every so often, of course, but the nice thing about a world as isolated as this one is that it’s easy to monitor all the outgoing or incoming traffic from wider D-space. There’s no mass of people sending information to and fro for her to hide anything in. It’s like living in the only house for kilometres around. And I don’t mind telling you there are a lot of people who feel more comfortable with her a fair distance from TSAB core space.”

Nanoha was barely listening, busy fighting the urge to jump up and start dancing around the room. Her familiar, however, had more pressing priorities.

_’Hey hey hey hey hey! What about me, what about me? Did the Bureau make a special decision for me as well?’_

“Oh, right!” Quint said, snapping her fingers. “I forgot about that. Vesta Takamachi, do you recognise the right of the Bureau to hold you accountable under its laws?”

A long silence followed as Vesta wrestled with the question. Rolling her eyes, Nanoha gently knocked her on the head with a couple of fingers.

“Do it, you goof.”

_‘Oh, fine. I suppose. But only because Mistress wants me to! Humans still shouldn’t be judging a cat!’_ She paused. _‘Wait, are there cat Bureau judges? Oh, but I’d still be a better cat than them... oh, never mind, just tell me what they decided! Tell me tell me tell me!’_

Quint dipped her head and drew her arms up to her chest with mock formality. “Of course. It didn’t take long for the TSAB to realise that such a _powerful_ , _beautiful_ , _clever_ , _ferocious_ familiar...”

Nanoha felt Vesta’s ego swell with each compliment, and guessed where this was going. She hurriedly grabbed her own orange juice to hide her smile as Quint finished.

“... was obviously too dangerous to allow free. So it’s life imprisonment for you, I’m afraid. You have five minutes to choose one squeaky toy and one shiny thing to take with you.”

_‘What? Ah! No! I take it back, I take it back, you’re not allowed to sentence me! Mistress! Help! Don’t let them take me away!’_

Quint held her grave expression for a few more seconds, then burst into laughter. Nanoha joined her a moment later, yelping as Vesta dug her claws in sulkily.

_‘So mean to me!’_ she complained. _‘Tricking a poor innocent kitten like that! It was a trick, right? You’re not going to lock me up?’_

“Don’t worry, little kitten,” Quint soothed, leaning forward to tickle her under the chin. “You’ve got nothing to fear. Just stay with Nanoha keep her safe, okay?”

_‘Will do!’_

Nanoha bit her lip. “And... Alicia and Hayate?”

The laughter left Quint’s face with a sigh. “I won’t lie to you,” she admitted. “They make people nervous. Very nervous. But... Precia made a very strong case. And the TSAB aren’t willing to kill two innocent children, not when the Lost Logia in them are sealed and dormant. If the seals ever break... well, we’ll tackle that if they ever do. But for the foreseeable future, they’ll be watched carefully here on Earth, and no more.” She ran a hand through her hair, and Nanoha blinked.

“That’s good to hear,” she said, biting her lip. “Um... Miss Quint? I know... I know we didn’t say anything about what we did between Schzenais and surrendering. About where we were. But, um...” She took a deep breath, and decided to go for broke. “The girls are fine. I mean, they’re not totally fine, because that place they were in was horrible and I think N- the older one is still a bit scared of everything because of what happened there, but she’s with her little sister and both of them are being taken care of and they seem happy and I swear they’re safe.”

She sucked in air and risked a glance upward. Quint’s face was neutral, composed, and a steel wall that let absolutely nothing show. Nanoha licked her lips. “And, um. I don’t want to give away where they are because they’ve never really been able to trust anybody and I don’t want to ruin that, but I did tell her about you, and I could tell them some more once I figure out a way to get it to them without showing the Bureau where they are, and I think, um... I think they’d want to see you. Eventually.”

For a moment she thought she’d gone too far. But then, slowly, the mask dropped away and Quint smiled tearfully at her.

“I’d... I’d like that,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “Thank you, Nanoha.” Carefully, moving with exaggerated caution, she shifted over to Nanoha’s couch and folded her into a gentle hug of her own. “Thank you,” she whispered again.

They stayed like that for a quiet, contented minute or two before Quint pulled back. “I hope you do consider joining the Bureau,” she said quietly. “We need more people like you. Seriously; for all that you caused a lot of trouble, you’ve handled these Incidents incredibly well. You’re quick-thinking, compassionate, pretty mature for your age and a genius magical prodigy. But it’s not going to be easy. You know that, right?” She looked Nanoha in the eye, dead serious. “You’re going to have to be the very best you can be – better than everyone else. You’ll have to fight to win people’s trust at first, and put in a lot of effort to prove yourself.”

“I know,” Nanoha assured her. “But it’ll be worth it. Because I’ll be helping people. And that’s what really matters.”

Quint ruffled Nanoha’s hair with a playfulness that might have been a little forced; papered over the vulnerability of a few minutes earlier. “And that’s why you’ll be such a good fit,” she smiled, as she headed out the front door. “Thank you from the TSAB, Miss Takamachi. For all your help. If and when you want to talk about careers, just give us a call. After all,” she winked, bending down to pet the cat Nanoha had seen earlier, “I need to poach you for the Ground Forces before the Air Force get their hands on you.”

...

The late summer sun streamed down through the line of trees. Star-like points of light shone down through the foliage. The cicadas chirruped outside, and the scent of fresh grass hung in the air. Outside, a grey cat stalked the small buzzing things that kept on cheating and flying away from her, telepathically bemoaning the fact that she wasn’t allowed to cast lethal magic spells on them.

Nanoha sighed and tuned out Vesta’s whining. It had been six months since Quint had told her the results of the TSAB’s judgement, and life went on. Though not quite as normal.

She would give a lot to be flying like the insects right now. She’d even settle to be outside on such a warm sunny evening, even as the sun crept down towards the horizon and the shadows grew. Didn’t people know autumn was coming? Autumn, full of cold and wet and damp and days which were nowhere near as nice as this one. But, unfortunately, she was still ten years old, and so ‘locked in a dull school classroom doing maths’ it was.

Well, okay, not locked. And it was the advanced maths course she’d been placed on. And really, she was lucky to be here at all, because it had taken a lot of work from the TSAB and her Papa’s friends to sort out everything about her having been declared missing.

But still. Boring. She’d finished the worksheet ten minutes ago, finished double-checking her answers _five_ minutes ago, and was now surreptitiously reviewing the rest of her workload with Raising Heart while she waited for the other students on the course to catch up.

Most of them were much much older than her. It was sort of awkward when she was the best student in the class despite having to sit on a cushion because the chairs were too tall.

_‘So I’ve still got my spellcrafting theory homework to do for Precia next Friday,’_ she mused, _‘Plus whatever gets given here today.’_ A twitch of her fingers brought up a subtle projection of her timetable, beamed straight to her eyes so as not to attract the attention of anyone else in the room. She scanned it, and perked up. _‘But I worked really hard and got a 98 on my last D-Space history test, so I can free up my yellow study blocks after sparring practice with Fate! And... hmm. I’m doing much better on Mid-language. Maybe I can trim my green blocks down to half an hour each. What do you think?’_

[Go for it, my master,] Raising Heart chirped. [Your spellwork needs improving!]

Nanoha pouted. _‘Aww, don’t tell me it’s more efficiency drills today.’_

[I’m sorry, my master.]

She blew out a morose sigh. She was way better than she had been last year, but Precia still insisted she wasted far too much power on ‘unnecessarily flashy displays’. Precia was utterly merciless when she saw things that displeased her.

It was working, though. Nanoha’s win-loss record against Fate was up to one in four. Soon she’d be able to match her friend evenly! Fingering one of the black ribbons holding her hair up, Nanoha smiled fondly and wondered what Fate would throw at her next in their practice bouts. They’d been working on a more formal introduction to combat than the sneaky, quiet practice they’d had on Schzenais or the more or less non-existent training she’d had before that. Raising Heart’s simulations and Yuuno’s advice only went so far, compared to someone trained like Fate.

But _finally_ the day was over and she could get out of cram school. Nanoha was acutely aware that she cut an amusing figure to onlookers as she left the building. All the older students went to different schools and it meant that her white-and-navy uniform stood out like a sore thumb among the blacks and dark blues of the high school uniforms. The fact that she existed below the eye level of most of her fellow students didn’t help matters.

“That never stops being funny,” Arisa said, grinning broadly as she leant against the gates, a stray cat twining around her ankles and leaving black fluff behind on her socks. “You always look so nervous that someone’s going to trip over you.”

“Arisa,” hissed Suzuka, elbowing her in the ribs.

“What? She does!”

“Yes, but it’s not nice to say it out loud!”

Nanoha pouted, which turned into a grin. “Well, at least we can go do something more fun,” she said.

_‘Like pet me!’_ Vesta chimed in, twining around Nanoha’s ankles. Claws pricked into her back as the kitten used her as a ladder to climb up to shoulder height.

“Like enjoy the sun,” Nanoha said firmly. “You know how _nice_ it is to actually have a summer? On Schzenais, their summers are colder than our winters. And the days are all weird and you have to use sun lamps so you go to sleep and wake up properly. I never want to go back there.” She glared at Vesta. “And you, you little monster, you’ve been running around chasing bugs all day when I was stuck in lessons so I don’t think-”

“I think it sounded fun,” Suzaka said softly. “Like, that dance-fighting ballet thing you talked about? That sounded like something I’d love to try.”

“Of course you would,” Arisa said, shaking her head. “But,” she jabbed Nanoha in the chest with a finger, “you’re right that you’re never going back there! Because I’ll never forgive you if you did. Now, come on! Let’s go to the park! Fate and Hayate are waiting for us!” She glared at Nanoha. “We had to come pick you up because you were late!”

“I’m sorry,” Nanoha said, bowing her head with mock remorse. “But we’re not allowed to leave early.”

“Arisa misread her watch,” Suzuka said with a quiet smile.

“Hmph! Did not!”

Shifting Vesta into her arms, Nanoha clambered into Suzuka’s big black car. It was a short drive to the park. She had to stop herself from dozing off in the warm back of the car. Even after getting out of the stuffy classes, she still felt tired.

“Honestly! What is going on there?” Arisa almost exploded. Nanoha’s eyes flickered open, and she sat up to look at what her friend was looking at. “Someone has dumped lots of old newspapers all over the place!”

“Maybe a delivery van broke and dropped them?” Suzuka suggested. The car drew to a stop by the entrance to the park, and the girls got out. The scattered papers were already being picked up by the wind, which playfully tossed them all over the side of the road. A street cat chased a stray magazine, savaging the paper and batting at it with a stray paw. 

Nanoha, on the other hand, could care less. But that would take active effort at not-caring, which she personally felt rather defied the point of apathy. And anyway, she was eagerly scanning the late-afternoon park for a sign of blonde hair. It always made Fate much easier to pick out from the crowd, which Nanoha felt was very convenient of her friend.

“Ah! There they are!”

Two girls sat on a bench, tossing a stick for a puppy who was madly chasing after it. Frowning a little, Nanoha silently wished that Fate would sometimes wear something other than black. She seemed to have infected Hayate too. According to Chikaze, Hayate used to dress in bright colours a lot more before the Book… did its thing. Now she tended to wear a lot more dark blues and greys and purples. 

“Nanoha!” Fate called out, spotting her and standing.

“Fate!”

_‘Nanoha, Nanoha, Nanoha, look! I got the stick!’_ Arf crowed happily, bounding over to Nanoha to dance around her feet. _‘Stick! Stick!’_

Ignoring several smug comments about feline superiority from Vesta, Nanoha bent down and accepted the stick. A good toss – and maybe a bit of magic –sent it flying over the pond, and Arf gave chase with a despairing cry of _‘Stick!’_

“That was a little cruel,” Fate told her, smiling as they drew close.

“No it wasn’t,” Nanoha grinned. “She wanted to chase it.”

The wind picked up. The hair on the back of Nanoha’s hair neck rose, until Vesta shifted to sprawl around her shoulders. 

“Brr,” Hayate said, hugging herself.

“You should put on your coat,” Fate told her, turning to help her with it. 

“Sorry,” Hayate said. “It’s just that it’s so sunny, but it’s getting cold already.”

Fate huffed a laugh. “Go to Schzenais, then talk to me about cold,” she teased gently.

The two of them had become fast friends. Nanoha was so glad about that! Fate hadn’t made many close friends at school off world or here in Japan, even though she hadn’t had the language problems that Nanoha herself had experienced. She often wasn’t comfortable around other people and retreated behind a cool mask, like Precia. But she and Hayate had started by sharing book recommendations when the three of them had been hospitalised and they’d just clicked. Hayate helped bring Fate out of the shell she sometimes hid in, showing the softer, gentle girl who hid inside.

Nanoha pulled them into a hug with a sudden surge of joy, huddling close. “Hi, Hayate! How are you doing? Good day?”

Hayate smiled back at her. “A bit sore,” she said, “but it’s so nice to be walking around. We managed to walk all the way here and Fate only had to help me a bit.” She paused in her attempts to get her dark grey coat on, and rummaged through her pockets. “Oh yes! I got a letter from the Wolkenritter today! The TSAB person who checks up on me dropped it off!”

“You didn’t say!” Fate accused her.

“Well, I was waiting for Nanoha, wasn’t I?”

“What does it say, what does it say?” Arisa said, pushing herself up on the back of the bench to crane over Nanoha’s shoulder. Suzuka sighed and tugged her down as Hayate cleared her throat.

“Dear Hayate,” she read out loud.

“How are you? We got your last letter. It’s so good that you’re walking around now. From what you say, you’re getting on well with your new carer. We wish we could be there, but we accept that we need to be punished for what we did when we tried to complete the Book. 

“Prison isn’t so bad. It’s quiet and peaceful, and the guards aren’t bad people. We can’t wait for the next time you’ll visit us. We’re all behaving very well, apart from Vita who has been given a time-out for damaging the wall by hitting the ball too hard when she was playing racquetball. Zafira has decided he wants a degree in Belkan literature, although that’s mostly because he found it hilarious that poems he wrote hundreds of years ago are now studied in schools. Signum has adopted a pet cat that lives in the exercise yard, and has named her ‘Rußig’. The two of them are very cute together, although she gets embarrassed when we catch her fussing over that little thing.

“Oh dear, this wasn’t a very well-planned letter, was it? I had all these things I was going to say, but then I forgot that the mail drop was today rather than a week from now and I have to rattle it off as fast as possible so I don’t miss the delivery. I promise promise promise I won’t forget next time and I’ll have more to say! Please write back!

“With love from Shamal.

“Zafira, Signum and Vita send their love too.”

“That’s nice,” Suzuka said.

“Yes,” Arisa said stiffly. Nanoha suspected she hadn’t quite forgiven the Wolkenritter for what they did to her.

“She’s so clumsy and forgetful,” Hayate said, smiling as she shook her head. “So how about you, Nanoha? Have you had any letters?”

Nanoha blushed pinkly, and wasn’t quite sure why. “I had one from Yuuno,” she said, biting her lip. “He says he’s coming over soon! There’s apparently lots and lots of Alhazredian ruins in the area, and that world? The one which was all Victorian-y? That’s another Alhazredian colony, only they’ve got more intact ruins at the poles. He’s going to be doing the first dig there – and he promised he was going to take me along!”

“That’s amazing!” Hayate gasped, eyes wide.

“I’ve been reading up on archaeology,” Nanoha said. “He’s been sending me books and we’ve been talking by messages and I think it’s really interesting. If I like the dig, he says he’ll take me on more.”

Arisa nudged her. “Do you think you’re going to be an archaeologist?” she said slyly.

“Well, I don’t know,” Nanoha said, scuffing her feet. “I mean, that might be fun. But I’m also learning lots of science and maths and maybe I might become a scientist or a researcher – but I’ve also been talking with Quint and she mentioned a Bureau young mages program that’s willing to let me in. That might even let me spend some time helping her go from world to world checking up on things in her TSAB corruption case.” She lifted her chin haughtily and crossed her arms with mock arrogance. “Maybe I’ll become an archaeologist-scientist-investigator-mage!”

Fate laughed. “You can’t have it all!” she accused.

“Well, why not!” Nanoha demanded.

_‘Now that’s the proper attitude, mistress!’_ Vesta chimed in, and preened at the general laughter.

...

“I’m home!” Nanoha called as the door slammed behind her. She slipped her shoes off, teetered for a moment as Vesta twined around her ankles and threw her schoolbag in the rough direction of the stairs. A thought brought pink wings into being on the strap; catching it in midair and flying it up to her room. A yelp from the stairs told her that its path hadn’t been entirely clear.

“That’s still weird,” Miyuki said, wrinkling her nose as she entered the living room. She was barefoot, wearing shorts and a t-shirt with her hair down loose, and was halfway through a yoghurt. “Flying bags and booby-trapped laundry, I swear, it’s like I’m living in a video game. A _weird_ video game.”

“I wouldn’t need to booby-trap the laundry if _someone_ would stop romping around in it and getting fur everywhere,” grumbled Nanoha, directing a glower at Vesta. “It clogs up the washing machine, you know.”

_‘Nyah!’_ Vesta shot back, hopping up onto the back of the sofa and pacing around until she found her comfortable spot. _‘I need to check it for mouseys. To make sure you’re not being...’_ her voice took on a dramatic hush, _‘_ spied on! _’_

Nanoha rolled her eyes. “You’re ridiculous,” she told her familiar fondly. “Come here.”

Vesta obediently clawed her way up Nanoha’s arm and onto her shoulder, where she began briskly tucking escaping strands of hair back behind her ears. _‘Food now,’_ she prompted, batting lightly at an ear. _‘And then you need to go do your hitting-things practice while I eat.’_

Momoko turned a tolerant frown on the pair as they entered the kitchen. “Girls,” she said, ignoring the field of reddish-pink light that was busily cutting vegetables and stirring the pot behind her. “Remember the rules. Vesta rides on Nanoha or stays on the floor, but no jumping onto the counters. And no flying.”

_‘I wouldn’t have to fly if you gave me food faster! I’m starving here! Remember I have four bodies to feed!’_

“Believe me, sometimes it’s hard to,” Momoko muttered. “Nanoha, your father and brother are in the dojo, if you want to join them. Supper will be in half an hour.”

“Got it!” Nanoha leaned forward to let her mother drop a kiss on the top of her head, then let Vesta down to her bowl and headed further into the house. The last of the sun streamed in through the windows, casting long shadows. Shiro and Kyouya were in the middle of a bout as she walked into the dojo, their swords glowing as they moved, struck and parried. It was always good to hear them sparring. Nobody had come out of the final battle unscathed, not even Nanoha herself, but time – and some help from the Healer and the TSAB – had brought everyone through their injuries.

“I’m ready!” she called as they came to a stop. Holding her arms out, she let her father sweep her into a brief hug, dropping a kiss on the top of her head as he did so. It was a habit he’d started after the fight with the Book.

“Good to see you, sweetheart,” he said. “How was your day?”

“It was good!” she beamed. “Mum says supper’s in half an hour, and then I’ve got sparring and efficiency practice with the Testarossas after that.”

“We’ve got you for thirty minutes, then,” Kyouya said. “Better make the most of it.” He brought his sword up into a guard position. “I think I have the spell-cutting move down, and you’re meant to be working on efficiency. So how about you set you make a couple of shots to hit me with, and every time I slice one in half you have to reform it from the ambient magic in the room.” He grinned. “I bet you can’t land three hits on me.”

Nanoha’s eyes glittered. “Raising Heart, please?”

[Time to practice, my master!]

The familiar weight of Raising Heart’s staff form settled into her hand, and two training shots appeared above it. She faced her brother from across the room as a faint aura appeared around his sword, her spells revolving above her head.

“You’re on,” she agreed. “Let’s go!”

It was a very smug Nanoha who walked back into the brightly lit kitchen. She’d lost one of her shots to cruel entropy after having it cut in half once too often, but succeeded in hitting Kyouya a triumphant third time with the other just as Momoko called them in. Vesta was looking equally smug, having apparently been eavesdropping with a sound-boosting spell, and leapt into her lap as she sat down.

_‘Your big mistake was betting against Mistress,’_ she told Kyouya helpfully. _‘She always wins when she tries her hardest._ Always _.’_

“Mmm,” said Momoko, arranging the bowls around the table. “Yes, we’ve certainly noticed that. Now, eat up!”

They turned their attentions to the food, Nanoha stuffing it down as fast as possible. But as she cleaned the last of her rice up, Momoko motioned for her to stay. Finishing the last few bites of her own meal she sat, hands folded, and gave Nanoha a carefully evaluative look. Beside her, Shiro straightened slightly, and Kyouya and Miyuki leaned slightly out of the way as they recognised the signs of a formal Takamachi parent-child conversation.

“... yes?” Nanoha asked. She wasn’t nervous, she assured herself. She hadn’t been doing anything wrong... well, nothing they knew about. Or had explicitly told her she wasn’t allowed to do. Yet.

It was possible Vesta was a bad influence on her, she reflected.

_‘Hey!’_

“We’ve come to a decision,” said Shiro, unaware of the short diversion in Nanoha’s thoughts, “about your winter break.”

Nanoha sat up straighter, and Kyouya and Miyuki leaned forwards with interest.

“You’ll have few weeks free, and we’ve decided,” Momoko continued, trading a glance with him, “that we are, provisionally, willing to let you spend them off-world. That’s including the time it takes you to get there and back, so if you decide to go a week’s travel away, remember you’ll only have a short time there.”

_‘But_ ,” Shiro added quickly, before Nanoha could start celebrating, “we have conditions. We want full knowledge of what you’ll be doing and where – that means you decide on who you’re going with and what you want to do, whether you want to spend time with your friend Yuuno or go to that Bureau training course for young talent.”

“You’ll contact us at least every other day,” Momoko picked up, “by video message if it’s too far for a direct link, but we’ll want updates on how you’re doing. And,” she added, smiling, “one of us will come with you to see the place before heading back home.”

“... wait, what?” All the other conditions, Nanoha had sort of expected, but _this..._ “You... you want to come with me? And see... see Dimensional Space? Explore other worlds?”

Momoko tilted her head and smiled fondly. “Well, we do have the bakery to run, so I don’t think we’ll be moving permanently. But yes, I think I’d quite like a holiday or two.” She grinned conspiratorially. “It would be rather exciting, actually. And you could show me where my flower came from!”

“I... I...” Nanoha stuttered. “I’d love to! I mean... I’d love to show you! And for you to come with me! Would... would you be staying with me the whole time, or...”

Shiro shook his head. “We do have jobs, and our holidays aren’t quite as long as yours,” he reminded her. “We’d probably come out to see the place you’d be staying and make sure it was safe, maybe spend your first day there with you, and then come back. Maybe whoever didn’t go out with you could come and pick you up at the end?” He glanced at his wife, who nodded.

“So,” she told Nanoha, “if you can decide on one or two things you’d like to do, we’ll hear you out and then help you arrange them. We’ll want to be involved in planning it out if there are other people involved, just to be sure we know what’s going on. No more running off and hiding what you’re doing from us, alright? We want to be involved in things from now on.”

”Magic and space are going to be part of your life from now on,” Momoko said, leaning forward to card a hand through Nanoha’s hair and down one cheek. “But we’ll always be your family, and this will always be your home. And you can keep both, Nanoha. Just let us be part of your life, and we’ll support you no matter what.”

Sniffing, Nanoha leaned into the touch. In her lap, Vesta purred reassuringly and pressed her head into Nanoha’s stomach.

Then, abruptly, she sat bolt upright. _‘... ah! Mistress!’_ There was a flash of light, and then Vesta was sitting on her lap in child-form, all knees and hair and bony elbows. “We need to be at Precia’s house in ten minutes!”

“Ah! Right! Hold on a minute...” Nanoha quickly darted away from the table, shoved her shoes back on and grabbed the bag she’d prepared that morning. “Okay, I’m off! Bye Mama! Bye Papa! Bye Kyouya and Miyuki!” One of the neighbour’s black cats was basking on their porch like a black rug, and almost got stepped on as she passed. “I’ll be back later, love you!”

“Love you too!” came the chorus as she sprinted out of the door.

...

The Testarossa residence was only two streets over from Nanoha’s house. It was a pretty little two-storey place, and a shed took up most of the small back garden. Nanoha knocked politely and waited, bouncing on her heels and cocking her head. She and Vesta had been trying out a new type of telepathy spell, and the young mage rode piggyback on her familiar’s senses as a faint hum approached them from inside the house. Vesta, in turn, rode piggyback on her. Nanoha wasn’t sure if she was clumsier in her child-form, or if it was just that there was less of her to move and so it moved a lot quicker, but either way she’d found that it was a bad idea to leave her unsupervised around roads when she was on two short legs.

Fortunately, Vesta hadn’t been set off by the presence of their neighbour’s cat, which Nanoha was silently thankful for. The little troublemaker tended to consider other cats in her space to be a personal offence, but right now she seemed happy clinging to Nanoha’s back.

They didn’t have to wait at the door for long – honestly, they’d probably been noticed as soon as they turned onto the street. The door swung open, and Precia’s wheelchair moved back smoothly to make way for her. Slipping out of her shoes, Nanoha offered her mentor a grin and a box of Midori-ya cupcakes from her bag.

“Blueberry this week!” she announced proudly. “I helped with the icing. Mama says hi, and also that she wanted to look at Dr Saroukh’s def... defin... his really well-known article on gradient mathematics in shooting spells.”

Precia raised an eyebrow at her as she took the box, her wheels moving smoothly and without only the faintest hum as they headed in to the kitchen. She was showing her age, with streaks of grey in her hair and lines that had not been there before – but despite that, she seemed far more alive than when Nanoha had met her for the first time. “Your mother is perfectly capable of requesting scientific papers from the Bureau by herself, dear,” she pointed out, not without humour.

“I know,” Nanoha nodded. “But she prefers getting them from you, because the ones the Bureau lets us download don’t have pencilled-in comments and criticism.”

Precia chuckled, though her smile faded to a wistful one as they passed the portrait in the hall. It was a wide one, taken on Schzenais under the sun lamps. Alicia was in front, with Fate, Arf, Vesta and Nanoha herself. Behind them, Precia sat, along with...

... with Linith. A lump formed in Nanoha’s throat, as it still did every time she saw the picture, and Precia softly traced her familiar’s face through the glass with a bittersweet smile. For a moment, time seemed to hang there as they paid their respects.

Then the moment passed, and they moved on. “I suppose you’ll want to start by sparring,” Precia said. “Fate and Alicia are already waiting. Shall we?”

From the inside, the garden shed didn’t look anything like the wooden construction it was on the outside. Metal-panelled walls surrounded a ritual circle on the floor, and it took only the slightest hint of effort for Nanoha to push them through to the next world over; a Type-1b where they’d set up their sparring grounds. They were in an alternate-Japan, so the sun was just starting to set. Nanoha sighed. The red sky was pretty here, but she was sort of wishing it was still midday.

Fate and Arf were already up in the air, and Nanoha and Vesta took off to hover beside them. Alicia sat primly on the floating Bureau drone that was monitoring the group, her doll hovering beside her and a bag of sweets in hand.

“Okay!” she announced. “Today we’re playing Hoop-Barrierball! Both of you have to make a hoop _this_ big!” She held her hands out, about fifty centimetres apart. “And float it over your heads! Then! You get three barriers the same shape and size! None of them can get closer than a metre to your hoop! Whoever shoots a shot through the other person’s hoop first wins!” She gave them both a glare. “And Nanoha, no bombardment spells and Fate, no going faster than Nanoha’s spells can keep up with! And you can’t block with your Devices, either! Okay?”

[Understood, ma’am!]

[Yes, meister]

Nanoha rolled her eyes. Alicia seemed to come up with the rules of their sparring matches more or less off the top of her head, and tended to pile them on until they started overflowing. It was easier just to let the Devices handle what was and wasn’t allowed. And focus on winning!

“Ready, Raising Heart?” she whispered.

[Let’s win this, my master!]

And they were off, soaring through the red sky and darting around one another, trying to make sure the setting sun was behind them. Fate was faster – Fate was always faster – but Nanoha had her beaten on firepower and shot control. Her Axel Shooters (“new rule, Nanoha, never more than six shots at a time!”) kinked and swerved, tracking Fate unerringly as she leaned on Raising Heart to keep her barriers moving. She batted away Plasma Lancers, ducked under binds – even sucked in her tummy to avoid an Arc Saber in the name of lining up a perfect shot.

Which bounced off Arf’s side with a sad little ‘phut’.

“Hey! Foul!” Nanoha cried out, stamping her foot in mid-air and looking at their judge imploringly. Alicia gravely looked up from her chocolate lolly and considered the dispute.

“I said only three barriers,” she decided, “and Arf isn’t a barrier, she’s a familiar, and she was more than a metre away from Fate’s hoop. So it’s allowed! Besides, Vesta is being sneaky and invisible for you. I saw some of your shots disappearing.” She nodded firmly. “So it’s allowed! But Nanoha, your shots have to be visible, and Vesta and Arf...”

The lolly returned to her mouth for some contemplative sucking. “... they can shoot too,” she decided. “But still no invisible shots. It’s boring if I can’t see what’s happening.”

Pouting, Nanoha conceded and had a quick whispered conversation with Vesta, still invisible and prowling. She could see Fate eyeing her, holding a similar tactical planning session with Arf. Which was why it was important that she move first. She sprang into action, six Axel Shooters heading straight for Fate – and as she’d expected, Arf sprang forward to bite and block them. Fate had ceded two of her barriers to her familiar, who used them far better than she could, leaving her free to concentrate on offense.

It was a tactic she was a teeny bit too reliant on. Nanoha grinned. She was better at thinking outside the box than her friend.

One Axel Shooter made it past Arf, just barely – only to glance off Fate’s remaining barrier, whizzing off with enough speed that she’d be gone before Nanoha could turn it around. By then it would be too late. The Plasma Lancers were already closing.

“Vesta... POUNCE!”

Vesta sprang from nothing, frock billowing, scarf flying, directly behind Fate, in the path of the shot. Her boot lashed out, wreathed in red light, and _kicked_ Nanoha’s shooting spell, deflecting it again...

... straight through Fate’s hoop from behind.

“Hah!” Nanoha cheered as Vesta whooped with glee. The shocked look on her friend’s face was priceless. “I win this time!” She threw a questioning look at Alicia, who gave her a double-thumbs-up around her lolly, then beamed at Fate. “Really, Fate,” she sang. “You shouldn’t depend on Arf so much. You need to be able to keep up your own defences!”

Fate sighed, disgruntled. “Fine, fine,” she grumbled. “And well done. That was clever, that move.”

“Indeed,” Precia said as they dropped back down to the ground. “Congratulations, Nanoha and Vesta. Though your shot spread was a little too tight for a highly mobile opponent like Fate – you want to tailor it to whatever you’re shooting at.” She narrowed her eyes. “And you’re still wasting power. I have some new efficiency programs for you to study, once you’ve finished your spellcrafting homework.”

Nanoha brightened, and was almost immediately shaded again as Alicia swung down on the drone and leapt onto her shoulders. Since Nanoha was not an unfairly super-fit athletic cheater like Fate, this served no purpose other than to send her face-first into the stiltgrass.

“... ow,” she said, muffled.

“But first Nanoha has to- I mean _gets to_ sit with me!” Alicia demanded. “As a reward!”

...

It was late evening and the last traces of the sun were just creeping down below the horizon. Despite that, it was somehow brighter here on UA-99 than it was on Earth, despite them being in the same place geographically. Maybe it was the lack of the city, Nanoha reflected. There was no smog here, no high-rise buildings, no chemicals in the clouds to block the fading light. The field they sat in was part of a Japan that had never been touched by humans – or if it had, they’d never settled. The vast forests that stretched for hundreds of miles had never been cut down, the rolling fields had never been planted with rice. The evening sky above them was speckled with countless stars.

She never saw the Milky Way back home. It was even worse on Schzenais, where the wispy high altitude clouds tended to trap light from the sprawling city and blot out the stars. This was about as far from that icy planet as she could be; a warm, pleasant summer’s evening.

It was beautiful. But at the same time, it was... missing something. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what.

Alicia sat beside her, just outside the shade offered by a broad-beamed tree, making crowns out of flowers and wire and twisted paper. She hummed happily to herself as she worked, and had decorated herself and her doll lavishly with her handiwork. The toy had almost disappeared under the masses of improvised jewellery. She’d also changed her Jacket to console Fate on her loss, shifting it to a black sundress with pale highlights. It was showing the mud less than her normal sunny attire, which Nanoha supposed was something.

Nanoha herself was on Vesta’s lap; her familiar having taken adult form to fuss over her hair and clothing again. She bore it with good grace, content to be groomed. It was sort of relaxing, honestly.

“Nanoha, Nanoha! You won, so here you go!” Alicia offered her an elaborate flower-crown that Nanoha suspected was held together more by magic than structural integrity, copper wire and one of Fate’s hair ties twisted around some kind of dark blue flower she didn’t recognise. She accepted her prize and handed it up to Vesta to be arranged for the best effect.

Alicia beamed at her and slumped backwards over her legs, her twintails sprawling out on the soft grass. “It’s really nice here, isn’t it? I saw some hares last time we were here, running all over the place!” she said, plucking idly at random stalks here and there. “Oh, and look! It’s a kitty! It’s chasing fluff!”

“Mmm,” Nanoha hummed, her eyes half-closed. The warmth of the late evening, Vesta’s grooming and the satisfaction of a long day were all combining to lull her to sleep.

“I mean... it was hard getting here,” Alicia went on, “but it all worked out for the best, right? ‘Cause Hayate got rescued and the Knights are all good now and we don’t need to fight.”

Nanoha cracked an eye open. Alicia was biting her lip in the way she did when she wanted reassurance. “And... and there was lots of un-fun bits, and maybe... maybe some people made mistakes along the way, like... like doing things they shouldn’t have without knowing better. But that’s okay because in the _end_ we’re all here and happy, right?” she asked. “I mean... nearly all.”

They lapsed into silence for a moment, sharing sad memories.

“I think...” Vesta put in, “I think... Linith chose what she did. And that let the rest of us get here. I think she’d be happy with that. She’d be proud of us, and proud that her... her sacrifice gave us these happy times. We shouldn’t waste them.” She shifted, and Nanoha could tell she was eyeing Alicia over her head. “And you should stop beating yourself up over the teleporting thing,” she added. “It was stupid, yeah, but the bad stuff that happened wasn’t your fault.”

“... you mean it?” Alicia looked up, and Nanoha felt her heart melt a little at the vulnerability in her face. She’d have to tell Precia and Fate about this later, if Alicia was still insecure about it. Right now, though, she needed reassuring.

“We both mean it,” she said firmly, and watched Alicia light up a little.

“And you’re happy too, right? You’re not sad because of...” Alicia trailed off, biting her lip. “I mean, Hayate would probably be upset. If you were upset, because of the whole Book thing. I think she still feels guilty,” she added, nodding quickly and trying to sound self-assured.

“I’m...” Nanoha started, “... I’m okay, yeah. I miss Linith, but I’m not upset.”

Vesta shifted again. This time to look down at her. Nanoha couldn’t see her expression, but she imagined that it was a frown like Alicia’s, as the younger girl leaned forward.

“But everything’s good!” Alicia pressed. “You have to be more than just ‘okay’, right?”

“No, I mean... I’m...”

Nanoha hesitated, confused. She _wanted_ to agree. To say she was happy. But somehow the words just wouldn’t come out. She frowned, prodding at her feelings. She couldn’t put a name to it, but there was a hesitation there. A sense of... what? Dissatisfaction? Grief? She wasn’t sure.

“... I’m getting Fate,” Vesta muttered, lifting Nanoha enough to scoot out from under her and standing. “She knows about silly guilt-tripping that makes you not happy where you are.”

She trotted off towards the picnic blanket where Fate, Arf and Precia were sharing a small meal, leaving Nanoha and Alicia alone.

“I’m not _un_ happy,” Nanoha offered. “I just feel... like not everything is perfect. Like there’s something missing. Things are good, but...”

She frowned, grasping instinctively for the reassuring shape of Raising Heart. The concept she wanted was dancing just at the edge of her mind – she could feel it, like an object a fraction out of reach that she could only brush with her fingertips.

“... but... it’s... too good?” she tried. “No, not that, but...”

Alicia tilted her head, her doll forgotten, and looked up at her with wide-eyed curiosity. Nanoha concentrated for a moment longer and then blew out a sigh. Trying to force it wasn’t working, she just... something in her didn’t want to think about it. She tried a different tack instead, picking the first analogy that sprang to mind.

“Vesta once told me that the hardest thing to get right about illusions was all the little details,” she said. “Did you know that? It’s why they’re so hard. Making them is easy...” with a flex of her hand, a pink ball appeared, “... because it’s just light. It’s making them look _right_ that’s hard.” She wiggled her fingers, and the ball flowed into the shape of a rather malformed car.

“So Vesta could make an illusion of a little kitten, but maybe she’d forget to make its fur ruffle in the wind. Or not have it jump when a loud noise happened. Or its eyes wouldn’t narrow when it looked at something bright.” The pieces fell into place, and she flinched as she finally put words to what she was trying to express. “It’s impossible to get all the details right. Some of them just seem wrong, even if... even if you like them all.”

“... why are you telling me this?”

Nanoha swallowed, but her throat was dry. “Because... because apart from Linith, everything in my life is perfect, but deep down I still feel like I should be doing something,” she said. “Because even though I know we fought the Book months ago and the Wolkenritter are good now, it still feels like it was yesterday and I still feel scared when I think of it. Because...” Her voice cracked a little, and she gulped. “Because I don’t think Precia and Quint would really get along if they just talked to each other, and I... I don’t think Precia would be happy living down the street from my parents and not doing magic, either. Because I keep on seeing cats all over the place that all look the same, like they’re all copies of each other. But Vesta isn’t reacting to them or even making catty comments about how she’s so much better than them. Things aren’t _right_.”

She looked down at the tiny car; shorter than it should be and slightly lopsided.

“And because even though I know all the good things that happened in the last half a year or so, I couldn’t tell you what I had for breakfast this morning,” she admitted quietly. “Or what colour the front door of your house is. I don’t remember walking from my house to yours – it’s like I just dashed out of my house and then I was straight there. I remember travelling but... it’s like Fate says her earliest memories are. Like someone told me it happened, instead of the memory of it happening, you know?”

“No?” Alicia said, frowning. “Nanoha, you’re not making sense. I don’t remember walking to school because it’s super-mega boring. But it still happened.”

“No, no, it’s like… my life is made of scenes someone has stitched together and then I’m just… I’m just filling in everything around them. It’s like someone just told me ‘you talked to Quint and then six months later you’re living happily on Earth’ and I remember what happened in between but I don’t _feel_ what happened.” She sniffed, vaguely aware she was rambling to avoid having to say it out loud. “I don’t think I’m meant to be thinking about things like that. I should just be happy with how good things turned out.”

“N-Nanoha,” Alicia whimpered. “You’re scaring me. Stop talking in a scary way.” Her big red eyes brimmed with tears, and her lips wobbled.

Looking up, Nanoha met Alicia’s worried gaze full on. “But I’m not. Because... I think maybe they didn’t. I think that this... this perfect world, this victory we had... didn’t.”

She sniffed again, and had to force herself to finish the thought. But finish it she did.

“I don’t...” she choked out, “I don’t think this is real. I don’t think the Book got Chrono. I... I think it got me.”

...


	13. Epilogue Two

**_PSYCHE!_ **

**Chapter Eleven**

“... I don’t understand,” Alicia whispered, wide-eyed and fearful. Nanoha shook her head, the cool summer air stirring her hair.

“I know what it’s doing,” she said, though her voice wavered uncertainly. “Vesta - the real Vesta; _my_ Vesta – she wouldn’t just leave me like that when something was wrong. It wants me alone with you, so I don’t want to... to hurt you by saying things it doesn’t want to hear. So I’ll pretend everything’s okay, because the whole point of all of this was to protect you.”

“Protect me from what?”

“The truth.” Nanoha squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s okay,” she said. It was easier if she didn’t look at Alicia. This way, she didn’t have to see the hurt in her eyes. “You don’t really need to understand. But I do. I need to... to face it. Say it out loud. Or I really will just sink back into believing again, and that would be wrong. That would be the easy way, not the right one.”

She took a deep breath. “After we saved you, I thought that we could do anything,” she said sadly.

“But you can!” Alicia protested. “You saved me and you tricked the TSAB and you beat the Book and-”

“I thought that was proof, you know?” Nanoha continued, staring at the inside of her eyeballs. She could feel tears welling up. “That all you had to do was _try_ , and things would work out. That there’d always be a happy ending, as long as you did everything you could.”

She sighed, opening her eyes. “But... I was wrong. Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes there are things you can’t fight.” Swallowing, Nanoha sat down. “When I was very little – even littler than you- my Papa got hurt very badly. We didn’t know for sure that it would all turn out okay. Mama and Kyouya and Miyuki all had important things to do, but I... I couldn’t help. All I could do was... not be in the way. Not be a burden.”

Alicia’s eyes were wide as she stared up at her. Nanoha avoided them.

“He got better,” she said. “And maybe I took that as meaning that he’d worked really hard and just... made himself get better. But it doesn’t work like that. Precia...” Nanoha stuttered. “I think... I don’t think Precia is going to get better, Alicia. I don’t think Linith saved her. I don’t... I don’t think she can win against it. She’s just too sick.” She sniffed. “I think we just lost, this time. We tried as hard as we could, and... and we still lost.”

She hung her head, feeling empty. Where there was normally certainty and determination, now there was just hollowness, leaving her floating in a void. She couldn’t find her footing. She had nothing to push against.

“We lost, and I don’t know what to do. I’m alone here, just like I was then, and I can’t do anything to help, and... and it’s not going to end happily this time.” She sniffed. “I’m sorry, Alicia. I’m sorry I... I failed.”

...

The hunk of concrete was covered in splatters of slowly cooling metal, but it was the best cover he had right now. Chrono tried to ignore the heat bleeding through his barrier jacket and focused on assessing the situation.

The Plan was still good. In theory.

It was just that things weren’t _quite_ going as he’d wanted.

… and okay, he hadn’t really expected it to be as easy as his _ideal_ plan, but he’d hoped anyway. Which had been a mistake; he saw that now. Of course Takamachi wouldn’t manage to take out the Book in one shot. Of course it would absorb her and start rampaging even more out of control.

Also there was a berserk catgirl trying to claw his arm off at the shoulder, but he’d probably have expected that if he’d had time to think about it.

All in all, things were not going Chrono’s way. But the Plan. The Plan was still good.

If only he could get the familiar to listen to it.

“You _left_ her!” Vesta screamed at him over the awful wails that filled the air, swiping ineffectually at his Barrier Jacket. “She might be _dying! I_ might be dying! You _left_ her!”

Chrono wasn’t sure which one she thought was more important, and was fairly sure that neither did she. She was too far gone even to remember her mana-claws in her rage. Not that he was complaining about that. It was saving him having to lock her up in a bind. Regardless, there was no getting through to her, so he focused on more immediate priorities.

Like the Book.

He’d thought it was formidable before. But that had been nothing compared to what it had become. The white-haired woman that it had started as was still visible, but the black material of her dress was seeping off her in a thick black fog that engulfed everything nearby. Surfaces churned under it; skin and metal and chitinous plate. Barb-tipped wires had sprung from deep in the dark mist, and he was fairly sure that it was pulling material from within the Book’s extradimensional spaces.

She hovered at the centre of the devastation; just over the spot Takamachi had fired from. The wailing sound was coming from her – or possibly from the fog, he couldn't tell. It was almost like song, but it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He caught a few distorted words of Ancient Belkan here and there as the fog twisted and coiled like a living thing.

Not even a familiar could survive what they’d done to the Book, yet it was still upright. Even now, it wasn’t noticing the rain of rubble that was bouncing off it. Though that might be because a few bits of falling rubble paled in comparison to the beating it had already taken. Takamachi’s spell hadn’t initiated properly before it had eaten her, but the gathered power had still detonated in an uncontrolled explosion that had hit the Book point blank. Most of the already-battered city was just… gone. What little was left had been melted and warped by the Starlight Breaker. Swathes were still glowing red-hot. It had been all he could do to stay ahead of the worst of it with the familiar over one shoulder, and he’d still had to use a mostly-slagged building and his best shield to handle the rest.

Chrono was becoming increasingly convinced that something was _wrong_ with that girl. Who _used_ spells like that? Was it some kind of barbarian 97er tolerance of mass weapons that led to complete apathy towards collateral damage? And what kind of nine-year old mind came up with them in less than a month of study?

He risked another glance around the side of his hiding spot at the blasted wasteland that had been a city district a minute ago. Cracks had opened in the air; fractures in the barrier that Takamachi hadn’t managed to dislocate entirely. Violet plumes of high-energy radiation, mana and whatever else the Sea was made up of were surging through and Chrono made a mental note to avoid those open wounds in the world. He wasn’t sure exactly what a breach directly into the Sea would spit out, but it wasn’t worth testing his shielding against.

The Book still hadn’t moved. Maybe it was stunned. If Testarossa had survived the explosion, he could…

“You’re not _listening to me!_ ” the catgirl shrieked, and finally remembered she had magic. Bloody claws came out as she lunged, murder in her eyes.

Chrono had her bound and trapped in a sound-muffler before she got halfway, dropping her prone to the floor with blue wire wrapped around her limbs and pure venom written all over her face. She tried to shift into her war form, but the bonds held her tight. Her yells were hushed by the silencer in his spell. He put her to the back of his mind. He had bigger things to worry about.

The tome hovered in front of the Book’s chest. Magnified by his visor, Chrono could see the text in it _squirming_ ; the pages flickering madly. It was humming; a loud, low drone that lay under the wails of the fog, and occasionally it flickered for a second into a jet-black outline.

Something bulged outward from the pages and fell to the ground. It was covered in black oil; malformed and too big and a mishmash of hundreds of shifting features with burning eyes. Somewhere in the half-fluid shape of the thing, Chrono caught a flash of pink hair and a gleaming sword.

Ducking back down, he drew on the more practical side of his Navy brat education for a string of curses A flash of motion caught his attention. Testarossa’s familiar beckoned from a few dozen metres away, behind the remains of a building that had survived rather better than his own. Hoisting the catgirl over his shoulder, he checked the Book wasn’t looking his way and darted across. Her thrashing almost overbalanced him halfway there, but he managed to just about avoid dropping her, and got a vicious bite on the arm for his trouble.

“You,” he gritted out once he was safely behind cover again, “Testarossa’s familiar.”

“Arf.” Her gaze was flat and unfriendly.

“Arf, fine. Can you snap her out of this state and get her to listen to me?”

She glanced at the other familiar’s distress, then levelled an unimpressed stare at him. “I’m trying to decide whether I should help her gut you, actually.”

“Look,” he said impatiently. “The Book was coming down on us. It was a race to see who struck first. I had a split-second to act just before it hit. My attack programs held just long enough. She,” he gestured at the catgirl, “was only there to protect her mistress. There wasn’t much she could do against the Book except get hit along with her. The only one who absolutely _had_ to be there right up until the end was Takamachi. If she’d got her shot off before the Book reached her, we’d have won. I chose to trust her to pull off a miracle but plan a fallback in case she _didn’t_.”

“And she didn’t.”

Chrono sighed. “No, she didn’t. The explosion hurt it; not enough, but it hurt it. And it absorbed her, which means she’s inside it like my father was last time this happened. And the damage _he_ did still hasn’t repaired itself.” He gritted his jaw and slammed his staff’s butt into the ground. “That means it’s vulnerable if we can get a message to her, and _we have her familiar right here_.”

Arf blinked. Then blinked again.

“ _Oh_ ,” she said, sounding a lot less hostile. “Okay, yeah, I get it. So you were...”

“Planning for both, yes. I underestimated how fast it would crack Takamachi’s Device and start drawing power from the Jewel Seed _some_ maniac put in it,” he confirmed in a terse rush of words. Inwardly, he was very glad that Testarossa’s familiar seemed saner than her mistress. “Which means we have less time than I’d thought and we need to act fast, so _snap her out of it!_ ”

“Right,” Arf tapped her counterpart on the head, and Chrono shifted the silencer away from her ears to let her listen. “Vesta? Nanoha needs you right now, and you’re not being helpful. Quit thrashing, listen to his plan and I’ll help you beat him up later. Once she’s safe.”

The words seemed to cut through Vesta’s rage, though her blue eyes remained feral slits and her ears flat against her head. Then, reluctantly, she stopped thrashing. Chrono didn’t release her, but he let the bind slacken a little for comfort.

“So, Mr Bureau kid,” Arf said, punching her left palm with her right fist. “Time for your plan. What do we do?”

…

The staring match was intense and furious. Hayate did her level best to force authority out of her eyes and into the Book’s head and _make_ her stand down. Sitting up, she glared it down with all the power and fury of her nine years of life.

It didn’t work.

“No,” said the Book with a terribly final feeling. “I have released the Guardian Knight programs, but I cannot allow you to be harmed, Lady Hayate. And if you will endanger yourself...” She sagged for a moment, before her shoulders firmed. “Then I must treat even you as an adversary.”

Ah, thought Hayate.

Whoops.

The Book turned away and... and that _hurt_. That disregard. Hayate was used to many behaviours from her Knights, not all of them ones she liked, but _ignoring_ her was one thing they never did. She was taken aback enough that all she could do was gape as the Book spread her arms, lifting the darkness that surrounded them like a veil.

And for the first time, Hayate saw the heart of the Book of Darkness.

It was big. She’d thought that the black space was big, but it had been empty, and there was only so much big that emptiness could get across. And it wasn’t empty anymore. The sparkling diamonds sprinkled across the sky were still there, but she could see them more clearly now; see the pulse and beat of light as it ran through them in patterns. And seven shapes loomed nearby.

They were like skyscrapers, sort of. If a skyscraper were built by someone with no regard for gravity, a fixation on crystal and shiny black glass and a thing for connecting everything they built with bridge-cable-chain things made of light, then it might look a bit like these. Glowing white rain fell from the sky, curving as it went to orbit them in giant interwoven streams that were drawn into the crystalline shapes.

She couldn’t tell how far away they were, exactly. They loomed in a way that made it hard to judge. There were smaller shapes around them, all made of the same crystalline stuff that light moved through like blood. Some of them – zippy little bits and larger chunks that moved with the ponderous gait of really big stuff – were moving between the towers and the other smaller structures that hung around them. She beckoned one of the nearest cubes closer, and watched as it moved smoothly through the air.

About twenty metres away from her, it hit a shimmer in the air and passed through with what would have been a ‘plop’ if it had been a sound. Wobbling a little, it floated over to her and dropped into her hands. It felt like smooth glass, cool to the touch and slightly staticy. This close, she could see the light-rain inside it –coruscating chains of things that she thought were probably numbers, doing things she couldn’t begin to understand. It hummed gently in her hands and she let it go, watching as it plopped out of the shimmer in the air again.

Her eyes narrowed. That shimmer looked quite a lot like the edge of a barrier. Which would mean that most of this space wasn’t... real, exactly. There was a little bit that she was in, and then the rest was like a... a simulation. In fact, she realised as she squinted, she could see a faint smudge in the distance, beyond the towers, which looked a lot like... well, her.

So. How did that help her? Well, if this space was actually smaller than it looked, that meant... that she was probably closer to the outside than she’d thought. If she could just get to that shimmer-barrier, maybe she could get out and fix things herself!

Hayate frowned, and looked at the nearest tower again with a more critical eye. Now that she was over her first impression, she realised that it wasn’t a single structure. It was four; arranged so close as to almost interlock and turning in a slow orbit.

Her Knights, she realised. Which meant... these big tower-things were parts of the Book! Big parts! And some of them looked... wrong. Two of them were darker than the others; covered in black ooze that she could see squirming even from this distance. The gunk was spreading from one of them along the light-bridge-cables to the one that housed her Knights. Of the other four, three seemed more or less fine, and the last...

... the last was glowing, she realised. Glowing in a way that couldn’t come just from the light-rain that was swarming around it so densely that it blocked most of her view. The light came from within; a furious pink colour that was flowing down pulsing light-bridge-cables into the other towers and brightening the background darkness to a charcoal grey. The falling light-rain was starting to take on a definite reddish tinge.

The girl from the hospital, Hayate realised. The one who wore white. Her magic was pink. And she was in here, like Hayate. And the Book was... paying a lot of attention to where it had her.

That sounded bad. And even worse was the way that the gunky squirming stuff was trying to take over her Knights. She clenched her fists. For the supposed ‘master’ of the Book, she certainly didn’t seem to have much authority in here. The Book’s avatar wasn’t listening to her orders, and she was willing to bet the black gunk wouldn’t either.

... so... maybe orders were the wrong way to go about it?

“Are you happy?” she asked hesitantly. The Book’s avatar turned from where she’d been looking at the glowing building with a confused look.

“... Lady Hayate?” she asked.

“Are you happy?” Hayate repeated, more firmly now, challenging her to answer.

“I have told you, Lady Hayate,” the construct said, sagging. “I grieve for the harm I am doing you, but I cannot...”

“Are,” Hayate cut her off, “you _happy?_ Right now? Yes or no?”

“... no.” It was a whisper. “I am not.”

Hayate smiled beatifically. She knew how to do this. After all, she’d done it before.

“Then I’ll help you.”

The Book _gaped_ at her. Well, her mouth opened a little and her eyes widened, which by her standards was speechless gaping. Hayate kept smiling, and held out her hand.

“I’d forgotten, with all the bad things and scariness and worry,” she said. “How all this started. I just wanted to give you all a home. To make you food and give you a place to live, instead of making you do things or giving you orders.”

She winked and wiggled her fingers. Slowly, hesitantly, the Book took her hand; cool fingers wrapping around Hayate’s.

“So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll help you. And that means I better make up for lost time because I’ve been helping the others for months and you haven’t even got to taste my cooking yet!” Hayate told her. “Now. Tell me what’s wrong, and we’ll see if we can think of something to do about it. And that is...”

She paused, biting her lip, and made a decision.

“... and that,” she finished carefully, “is an _promise_.”

...

“Nanoha.”

She looked up at the sound of Precia’s voice; sharp with disapproval. The wheelchair had snuck up on her without her noticing; Vesta a scared-looking shadow next to it. Further back, Fate and Arf watched nervously.

“Your familiar tells me you’ve been upsetting Alicia,” Precia said, scowling. “Even if you have been having...” she waved a hand, “bad dreams, or something similar, it is not fair to frighten her like this, Nanoha. More than that; it is cruel.”

Nanoha flinched, and Precia sighed. “Perhaps the fight with the Book left more than just physical wounds,” she suggested, rather more gently. “I can find someone you can talk to about this, as long as you promise not to be so thoughtless in the future.”

Huddling on her herself, curled up into a ball, Nanoha stared at the ground. Her insides felt like lead. There was a painful lump in her throat, her eyes stung, and the corners of her mouth kept curling downward miserably. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to cry. But when she reached for something solid, there was only the faintest suggestion of solid ground.

“Nanoha?” Precia prompted, softening a little further. “If it is losing Linith that prompted this... we all miss her, my dear. But we must accept that she is gone.”

... the faintest suggestion of solid ground. The vaguest suggestion of certainty. But it _was_ there. She was alone and outmanoeuvred and a failure at what she’d promised to do. But there were still a few truths left that she could cling to.

And more importantly, a lie she could reject.

“No.”

“... I beg your pardon?”

Nanoha’s head rose, and her back straightened. Her eyes were bright with tears, but her voice was steady. “I said no. No more talking.”

A flash of light, and her staff was in her hand. “Raising Heart. You’re with me, aren’t you?”

[That’s right, my master!]

Nanoha swung the Device once, testing the weight. The Jewel Seed still sat in its box behind the head – a box that wasn’t tucked away like it should have been. Another strike against this world. Surely the TSAB wouldn’t have let her keep it. They were nice, but not _that_ nice. And if it was out instead of folded away, maybe that was because it _was_ being used. Just not in a way she could see.

She pointed her partner straight upwards. “Then let’s test it! Starlight Breaker!”

[Starlight Breaker!]

“Nanoha!”

“Mistress!”

“Child!”

Fate, Vesta and Precia all spoke with alarm, but Nanoha was only looking at one of them. “See,” she said softly, sniffing, “if I’m wrong, then this won’t matter. I’ll just be firing it into the air. But if I’m right, and I’m in the Book of Darkness, I need to get out.”

“Nanoha, listen to me.” There was definite panic in Precia’s voice now, and Nanoha flinched a little as the woman wheeled towards her. Pink light began to gather above them as the vast rings of her best spell slowly wrote themselves through the air. “Nanoha, you’re not thinking straight. Stop this foolishness-”

“Or what? You’ll stop it?” Nanoha took a deep breath and jutted her chin out. “No. If you were the real Precia - if that was the real Fate - they’d already have stopped me.” Her lips twitched. “And you know, I learned something from that fight. The draining spell the Book used when me and Chrono bound it; I got a pretty good look at it. I think I figured out how it worked. It was pretty neat, so I’m taking it! Raising Heart? Let’s get to it!”

[As you say, my master! Deploying Enhanced Drain!]

The spell rings pulsed. Once, then twice. On the third pulse, they changed. The space between the pink lines that bordered each ribbon of glyphs darkened to solid black bands; vivid pink light outlining the edges and carving symbols into them. And they began to pull.

Suspecting it had been one thing. Seeing it was another. Nanoha couldn’t help a gasp as - slowly at first, then with increasing speed - the landscape began to dissolve. It started far away. Trees and hills blurred by distance began to lose colour and definition as her spell ripped magic out of the simulation in streaks of coloured light that spiralled into the growing pink sphere at its centre. As the dissolution got closer, she could see it better. Objects just... disintegrated, like a sugar cube in hot water, breaking up into coloured motes of light that were pulled up into the hungry condensation spell.

She could already feel the draw on her own magic that powering the pump took. The mana wanted to be spread out evenly. Forcing it all into a tight little ball took power. The more mana you were cramming into a space, the more power it took.

From the amount of power this was demanding, there was already more magic in the proto-Starlight Breaker than anything Nanoha had seen since the Garden of Time. And it was _still growing_.

“Mistress!”

[My master!]

Vesta’s cry almost broke her. If it hadn’t been for Raising Heart, her focus would have faltered - fatally. Even as it was, the growing sphere of light wavered dangerously as she watched the copy of her familiar dissolve into light along with Arf, to be drawn up into the spell. Fate was next, watching her with betrayed red eyes, and then Alicia, vanishing with a sob and a cry of “Nano-” that was cut off halfway through.

“This world isn’t real,” she ground out through gritted teeth. “It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it _isn’t real!_ ”

“Then why not stay here?” Precia alone remained, though the colour was seeping from her dress and her wheelchair was gone; leaving her floating in midair. She held out a hand, ignoring the way her fingers were blurred and indistinct. “Why not accept this dream? Here, you have everything. Everything you wanted. Your life is happy, your friends are content. I am alive. Perhaps even Linith survived somehow - would you like that? The world outside is cruel, Nanoha. You know that to be true. 

She stared at Nanoha, her eyes losing their colour and her hair fading to white. “Your ideals mean nothing there. Determination and good intentions will not save the day, the people you love will not _get along_ as though they didn’t hate each other. You will be split between two worlds, grieving those you lose, fighting a universe that is cold and callous and cruel. _Forever_.”

“I know,” said Nanoha. Precia smiled, and Nanoha couldn’t tell if it was sympathetic or cruel as she spread her arms wide. She could see through the woman’s palms, she realised, and winced.

“Then isn’t this a happier place?” Precia asked. “Weren’t you content here, before you tore at its foundations, before you began to destroy it. Isn’t this a _better world?_

“Yes,” Nanoha admitted. “It is. But... it’s not a _real_ world. And you know what?”

Precia raised a scornful eyebrow, and Nanoha jutted her chin out stubbornly.

“I’d _rather_ have the real one. Because I might not always be able to save the day by trying hard, but _I won’t always fail!_ ” Precia flinched backwards in surprise, and Nanoha pressed her advantage for all it was worth. “We lost this time! We lost Linith! We lost you! But we can still save the Earth! We can still save Hayate and Chikaze and the Wolkenritter! We saved Alicia back with the Jewel Seeds! I saved Yuuno and Fate, and they saved me! I was wrong, but I wasn’t all wrong! That little bit of right is worth holding onto! Sometimes I’ll lose, but _sometimes I’ll win_ , and that makes it always worth trying! I _can_ help people! I _can_ make a difference, even if it’s not as big of one as I thought! And I’ll suffer all those losses and take all those failures myself if it means someone else won’t have to!”

[Target lock cannot be acquired, my master,] Raising Heart put in. [Where should I fire?]

“Out!” Nanoha shouted. “Straight up into the sky! We’ll shoot this dream world with all our power and break through! We’ll shatter the sky to help our friends! We haven’t lost this yet! And as long as we keep fighting, the Book’ll never win!”

“So you’ll abandon us, then.” Despite the colour draining out of the world and the streams of matter pouring into the growing sphere, Precia remained where she was. Her quiet voice reached Nanoha even through the howl of the growing Starlight Breaker; arriving directly in her brain without going via her ears. “You’ll choose a world where Alicia is alone. Where her mother is dead and she’ll forever be in danger. You’ll condemn her to the pain you so narrowly avoided when you were young.”

Nanoha met her eyes. And how, _how_ had she not realised before? The real Precia wore a mask of calm, but it masked a pain more profound than Nanoha had ever seen. Even regaining Alicia hadn’t fully healed so many years of grief. But this woman’s now-colourless eyes weren’t sad. They weren’t even cruel. They were empty.

“She won’t be alone,” Nanoha told her. “I’ll... I’ll probably never get to say this to the real you. But she won’t be alone. She’ll have Arf and Fate. She’ll have Vesta. She’ll have me. And... and I’m sorry.

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t save you,” she went on, and let it all spill out; everything she wanted to tell her older woman. “I’m grateful for everything you taught me, and I’ll keep getting better with magic until I’m as good as you were. And then I’ll get even better than that! You showed me a world full of magic and space and amazing things, and I promise to make the most of it!” Tears were trickling down her cheeks now, and she was surprised that the heat of the pink star above didn’t turn them to steam. “I don’t... I don’t think you were perfect. You were sad and you closed yourself up too much and hid away from your feelings instead of facing them. But you tried your best, and I’ll remember that. I’ll remember you.”

She shook her head quickly and blinked to clear her vision. “But if I stay in here forever then the Book will win, and Alicia really will be alone. And you wouldn’t want that, ever. So I need to go set things _right_.”

She turned her gaze upward, squinting her eyes shut against the painful brilliance of her spell. It was even eating the land under her feet now, and when she glanced across at where Precia had been, the woman was gone. She was alone, except for Raising Heart. Really alone, like after Papa had nearly...

... but she was never alone these days. Not really. There was one person who’d always be with her, no matter how far apart they were. And who she could always, always rely on.

_‘Vesta!’_ she shouted, as loudly as she could, pouring all the focus she could spare from the terrifying mass of power spinning at the end of her staff. _‘Vesta! Can you hear me? I need your help!l_

...

_‘Hello? Can anyone hear me? This is Hayate Yagami!’_

Chrono almost dropped his Device. The mental voice was coming from within the monstrosity that the Book had become. For a moment he didn’t know how to respond.

Then training kicked in.

_‘This is Enforcer Chrono Harlaown from the TSAB,’_ he sent back; scattering the tight-beam message to have it approach the Book from another direction. _‘Repeat that, please?’_

There was a brief pause. _‘... uh, my name is Hayate!’_ the voice said again, sounding confused. _‘I’m not sure what... listen, the Book of Darkness is mine! I’m inside it at the moment and something’s wrong with it; that’s why it’s attacking! The Master Control Program has agreed to help me fix it! Is everyone outside okay?’_

Training only went so far. Chrono gaped. Of all the things he’d expected to hear... that one wasn’t even on the list of rejects. He wasn’t even sure which part to tackle first.

Wait, yes he was.

_‘How are you sending this?’_ he demanded, making frantic gestures at Testarossa’s familiar and opening his side of the channel up to her. The girl speaking from the Book was broadcasting; completely unsecured. _‘What do you mean, you’re inside the Book?’_

“Find Testarossa,” he hissed as the wolf-woman quirked an eyebrow. “Get her here as fast as possible. If you can round up Scrya as well; all the better.” She pursed her lips, but nodded and took off.

The response from the Book took a few more seconds to arrive. _‘The Book took me into its core when it went bad! I got the part in here to listen to me, but she says the defence program is in charge at the moment. I can’t get full access; just… just the stuff the defence program has nothing to do with, like talking!’_

_‘There’s no record of any previous masters talking during a rampage,’_ Chrono pointed out; instantly suspicious.

_‘Well maybe they didn’t try talking to her!’_ Yagami snapped back. _‘She tried to send me to sleep in an illusion before she tried talking to me; I just fought it off! I’m the master and I’m not going to lie around being all sleepy now! I did that enough when it was making me sick! So she’s going to help me fix her!’_

She. Her. This native girl was speaking as if the Book were a _person_ – an ally, even. Chrono glanced around his cover again at the Book. Another half-formed shape was flowing out from it; spiked maces and hammers and swirling orbital metal spheres protruding from the mass of forms. He thinned his lips. It would be best to attack now, before it managed to summon the rest of these twisted Knights. But if Yagami was telling the truth…

Chrono’s jaw tensed. He couldn’t let emotion and hunches get in the way of this. He had to work with the facts. The facts were safe, clear and constant. He could trust the facts, in a way he couldn’t trust himself right now.

Fact: The Book was a recurrent disaster. The death toll it had reaped across space was too high to count – estimates put it at tens of thousands to millions every single rampage, and it had been around since the early Warring States.

Fact: It had killed his father. Mei’s father. Who knew how many other loved ones; how much grief and pain and suffering from one Lost Logia… no. He shook his head. Stay calm. Stick to the facts.

Fact: In all the time it had been rampaging, it had never been stopped. Never been put down permanently. Nobody had ever come up with a lasting way to prevent it from reappearing, or even diagnose how it worked. Not even its masters – and there had been _so_ many; almost all better mages than this girl. None had ever claimed to know a way to stop the thing they hosted.

Conclusion: Given the balance of probabilities, then, this was probably a trick. An attempt by the Book to deflect its attackers, to push them off guard.

Conclusion: He should give it no thought; attack with everything that he had and concentrate on destroying this manifestation of the Book before it could carve a bloody path across the continent. Yagami’s loss was regrettable, but she had been doomed from the moment it latched onto her.

…

… fact. That was Gil Graham’s logic. And Chrono had seen one UA-97 mage pull off the impossible before. He’d already been planning to use that fact.

_‘I’m not risking everything on the chance that you’re right,’_ he sent back. _‘But if you really can stop the Book for good; that’s huge. I’ll give you what help I can. Is Takamachi in there with you?’_

_‘I think so!’_ Yagami replied after a moment. _‘One of the big structures is glowing pink, and there’s lots of power coming out of it.’_ She paused. _‘Not as much as there was, though. The Book says she’s doing something in there, I’m not sure… wait, she`s trying to get a message out!’_

Chrono just about refrained from punching the air in triumph. _‘Put it through!’_ he ordered.

_‘Vesta!’_ Takamachi’s voice was a desperate shout, and next to him her catgirl went rigid and stopped straining against her bonds. _‘Can you hear me? I need your help!’_

Chrono dispersed the bind with a wave and opened his channel to Vesta before she’d made up her mind about what to do. _‘Takamachi; this is Chrono Harlaown. What’s your status? Are you inside the Book?’_

_‘Mistress!’_ Apparently answering Takamachi rated higher than disembowelling him. That was nice to hear. _‘He grabbed me off you! He_ abandoned _you!’_

… that was less nice. _‘I was-’_ Chrono started defensively, but surprisingly Takamachi cut him off before he could get any further.

_‘That doesn’t matter! We can argue about it later! I’m about to fire a Starlight Breaker from inside the Book! I ripped all the mana out of the simulation it was trying to keep me in! There’s quite a lot here! I mean, really really a lot!’_

“You did wh-” Chrono began out-loud, and then bit his tongue. Now was not the time.

_‘Vesta, can you get me an outside view of it? I don’t know where this blast is going to go! And I really want to know, because this is the biggest spell I’ve ever cast! But I’ve got it under control, I promise!’_

_‘Wait,’_ Yagami put in, sounding rather alarmed at this. _‘Fire a what? Is that what all that pink light is?’_

_‘It was taking lots of power from me. I took it all back, and then some! This new draining spell I copied from it and attached to Starlight Breaker is way better than my old one! But there’s really no time to explain! Vesta, quick! Chrono, what are you planning to do?’_

Despite the stakes and his misgivings about the size of the spell Takamachi was pulling out, he couldn’t help but grin as the grey-black kitten leapt out to get eyes on the Book. _Two_ allies within the Book’s structure, and open communications with both of them. Suddenly things were going better than he’d been hoping for.

_‘Exactly what you’re doing,’_ he said. _‘Here’s what I know….’_

…

Hayate listened quietly - and with a little concern - to the conversation the two young mages were having. It was a little rude to eavesdrop, but she couldn’t really help it - they were having it through her. Data streamed in as she and Chrono traded a quick flurry of plans.

Neither of them had thought to ask Hayate about said plans, which was a bit worrying, because she wasn’t sure she was comfortable with Nanoha firing a powerful bombardment spell from inside the same warped space Hayate was sitting in. But just looking at the blinding pink glow from inside the superstructure was enough to tell her that it was too far gone to stop now. There would be no chance of gradually powering down a spell like this. It was fire or have it explode. And she had to admit, she didn’t have any better plans for stopping the corrupted parts of the Book from running rampant.

_‘Excuse me!’_ she called, interrupting them. _‘What’s the Defence Program doing? Has it hurt anyone?’_

_‘Yes,’_ Chrono replied curtly. _‘No fatalities yet, but one of our mages is down. He took its arm off.’_ Hayate’s gasp went unheeded as he kept going. _‘At the moment it’s stopped moving. It’s regenerating its Knights, or... corrupted versions of them. Here.’_

The image file he sent chilled Hayate’s blood. Three monstrous... _things_ , around a wounded Book. And it was in the process of making another. “What’s it _doing?_ ” she demanded of the Book’s avatar. “Why are they all...”

“By your order, Lady Hayate, the curse is resurrecting your Guardian Knights,” the Book replied distractedly. She was standing at the edge of the little bubble of space they occupied, her narrowed eyes fixed on the glowing pink superstructure that held Nanoha. “It cannot raise them properly. That would require action from you. But it has corrupted and claimed my archives, and is piecing together facsimiles of them from tainted memories and the records of the spells of other foes of the Book.”

“My ord... _my_ order? I didn’t... order...” Hayate trailed off as memory made itself known. “I... tried to order you... to restore them and stop fighting.”

“Yes, Lady Hayate.” The Book didn’t turn. “I could not follow the latter request, but sent a general notification about the former.”

Oh.

“... um,” said Hayate quietly. “So. You mean. The Defence Program is making them... because I told it to?”

“Indeed, Lady Hayate.”

Hayate winced. She was pretty sure “whoops” wasn’t going to cut it, and she didn’t actually know any words bad enough to fit the situation.

“I’ll... tell them that later,” she said nervously. “I, um... what are you staring at that so hard for?”

The white-haired woman turned. Her face was back to the hard, dispassionate mask she’d worn when she first appeared. “It is a threat to you, Lady Hayate,” she said; curt and clipped. “It must be eliminated.”

“... w-wait, what?” Hayate blinked. “Elim- that’s Nanoha; we’ve got a plan to beat the Defence Program! She’s helping!” She paused. “By... shooting you just when I’ve got through to you. Like how she’s apparently been shooting at my Knights over the last few weeks. And how she shot up the hospital the first time I met her. And never really apologised.”

She paused.

“… but I’m pretty sure she means well, and... you must have heard her and Chrono talking, they have a plan!”

She might as well have been talking to a wall. “It is a threat to you, Lady Hayate,” the Book repeated. “The curse is a threat, but a known one. I have tried time and again, and my cursed name and destiny bring all my masters to ruin, no matter my efforts. But this. This threat from within. This is a threat from which I can protect you. Must protect you.”

Turning her back, the Book reached out a hand towards the pink mass. “Swift knife of censure,” she whispered, “reach into my archives / and take that particular soul / who comprises the greatest-”

“Wait!”

Hayate pushed as hard as she could on her wheels to shoot forward and grab the woman around the waist. Well, legs. “Wait,” she pleaded again. “Just... wait a moment and listen to me, okay? Just... listen.”

She gulped air desperately as the Book turned to face her, tears pricking at her eyes. The Defence Program was bringing some sort of monster versions of her family back online, and it was her fault. She’d just wanted them to protect her, and now they were being used to hurt people. And now even in the name of protecting her, the Book was trying to harm her... well, not her friend, but her ally. And if they hadn’t tried to protect her in the first place, they might not have... might not have...

Why couldn’t they see that she’d never wanted this? Any of this! She’d only ever wanted them to be safe, and happy, and a family together. She hadn’t wanted them to fight to protect her. She’d wanted to give them a home where they wouldn't have to fight.

Oh, Hayate realised. _Oh_. Of _course_.

“I was wrong before,” she said. “I promised you wouldn’t have to fight, back when we first met.” The Book tried to object, but Hayate motioned for silence. “No, listen.” She nodded firmly. “That’s what I promised. So that means I was wrong before. Just helping you isn’t enough. Just making you food and giving you hugs and caring isn’t enough. It’s important – _really_ important - but it’s not all. I’m meant to _protect_ you. I’m meant to be in _charge_. And with everything they’ve been doing, and everything you _are_ doing, I’ve obviously not been doing my job.”

“My lady…

“Hayate.”

“My lady. Hayate. This curse that ravages your flesh is my fault. It is my hunger that is killing you. I must keep you safe from everything, but I cannot keep you safe from me. But I can keep you safe from this and so-”

“Hush. You’re wrong,” she said softly. “You don’t need to protect me from this. You don’t need to hate yourself for a curse that wasn’t your fault. You don’t need to sacrifice yourself for me.”

The Book twitched. Hayate felt it from where she was hugging the woman; a convulsive ripple of surprise. She kept going, stubbornly clinging tighter as the Book tried to flinch away. “It’s not your job to protect me,” she repeated. “Yours or my Knights’. It’s _my_ job to look after _you_. If your name is cursed, I’ll give you a new one. If your life is wrapped in a cruel destiny, I’ll help you change it. That’s what we had wrong all this time. If I’m your mistress, that means I’m _your_ protector! So that’s what I’ll do! The Book of Darkness, the Cursed Tome... I won’t let anyone call you such horrible things!”

She looked up fiercely, eyes blazing. “I’ll help you start over, no matter what! Give me full access! If I’m the lady of the Book, it’s time I started using that properly! Better than the Defence Program can! It’s _not_ doing its job, so I _will!_ Help me get control and I promise I’ll keep you all safe!”

The Book stared at her for a long, long moment. She twitched a couple of times; flickers of emotion crossing her face, and half-turned to look outward. Not at the glowing mass that was Nanoha, but at the corrupted superstructure that was the Defence Program.

“So be it,” she whispered, and her next words boomed and echoed so loudly that Hayate thought they must be shaking the very ground.

“A demand for access has been made. An accusation has been levelled. My master challenges the defender of the Tome, whose duty goes unfulfilled. She claims her rights as master of the Book of Darkness, and all that comes with them!”

An instant of deliberation passed, and then knowledge struck like a thunderbolt.

Hayate grabbed at her head, feeling like it was spinning and exploding at the same time. She felt crammed to bursting. Suddenly lonely years all by herself and six happy months with her knights were sharing space with words she didn’t understand in a language she didn’t speak.

And yet it made sense. It filled her with a solid, fierce glee that felt just as good as the way she could now breathe freely and could feel her legs. This was how she should have felt all along! This is what being the Lady of the Book should have felt like!

Slowly, she rose up from her chair. Four crow-black wings burst from her back.

“I understand,” she breathed. “I understand now. You’re just like my other Knights. You’ve been suffering for so long under this curse. But no-one was kind to you. You’ve just been locked away in here.”

Embracing the taller woman, Hayate beamed up at her. “Well, that’s going to change. You’re as much a part of my family as they are. And as your mistress I’ll give you a new name. A name that isn’t cursed. A name that isn’t soaked in blood or sadness or misery. A name you’ll always have, just for you.”

The Book’s twitches had become a continuous tremble now, and her attempts to pull free were forgotten. She looked down at Hayate with something vulnerable and fragile and newborn in her eyes; something that was part hope, part fear and part awe.

“The curse...” she objected half-heartedly. Hayate shushed her.

“We’ll deal with that later,” she promised. “Together.” Pushing down gently on the Book’s shoulders, she nudged her down until she knelt at Hayate’s feet. “In the name of Hayate Yagami,” she said, “Mistress and administrator of the Tome of the Night Sky, I grant you a new name. A name that means strength and loving support, starlight and cool night air, blessed fortune and calm guidance.”

Dark wings beat once, growing to envelop both figures as Hayate touched the kneeling woman’s forehead.

“‘Reinforce’. I grant this name to you in place of all others. Use it well.”

And as light built around the newly-named Reinforce, another gathering of power reached a critical point, and another young voice cried out.

“Starlight Breaker!”

...

UPDATE component_names cn SET cn.personal_name EQUALS ‘Reinforce’, cn.family_name EQUALS ‘Yagami’ WHERE cn.component EQUALS ‘master’;

COMMIT;

...

For the fourth time – and hopefully the last time - the black pages of the Book’s tome bulged with the shape of a monster.

“We shouldn’t be waiting,” Fate murmured. “It’s vulnerable; and it won’t stay that way for long.”

“I know.” Chrono’s lips thinned as he examined the reflection in a shopfront. _‘Takamachi, how close are you to firing?’_

Mental silence and the wailing of the Book were his only answer. He traded a worried look with Fate, whose face had paled. Her hands went white-knuckled around Bardiche.

“Maybe something happened to Hayate?” Arf whispered hopefully. “If she’s not there to channel messages…”

“If that’s the case, we’ve lost our help on the inside,” Chrono said bluntly. “And we can’t trust that Takamachi will pull through without the master on her side. Change of plans, then. It locks up for a second or so after disconnecting from one of those corrupted Knights. Arf, Vesta, if Testarossa and I fast-charge bombardment spells, can you keep the three it’s got out off us until we can fire? If we can hit it just as it’s frozen, we can probably do some real damage.”

Arf looked at the three circling _things_ that surrounded their enemy. “I can try,” she said dubiously. “Just… don’t take too long. The most we can do is slow them down.”

“No…”

All eyes swung to Vesta. Her eyes were screwed shut, her fists clenched, and she was swaying dangerously. “Give her… a few seconds more…” she murmured. “She feels… I think…”

For a split second she froze, and then her eyes snapped open and every line of her body shifted to radiate absolute terror.

“She’s firing!” she screamed. _‘Get down!’_

Arf practically tackled Fate to the ground. Chrono threw himself down, curling up to give his shield as little area as possible to protect. In the reflection, he saw the Book jerk sideways and draw away from the tome, its hand going to its side. He could hear a growing whine right at the top of his hearing range, slowing descending in pitch even as it grew in volume.

The Book jerked again, the forming Knight still only halfway out, and looked down at its midsection. Its expression, as far as Chrono could make out from the smeared reflection of the window, mingled resignation with homicidal rage.

Light grew and built in the spot under its hand, shining through its clothes, through the dark mist and shadow that clung to it, through the oily substance of the last Knight; all deadly wires and female faces. The Healer, Chrono thought. And the Wraith. Good. He’d concluded that of all of them, that was the most dangerous. The other three were ‘just’ superlative combatants. But the assassin of the Wolkenritter put all that skill into blindsiding its foes.

Three Knights launched themselves into the air at an unspoken command, unable to defend their source against a threat from within. The Healer-Wraith couldn’t; still tethered to its source. The light grew and spread until half the Book’s midsection was shining pink, so bright as to look incandescent white in the centre.

And then it erupted.

Chrono’s jacket flashed to nearly opaque, so what little he saw before the light consumed everything was through dark glass. But that split second was etched on his vision as he listened, even through the mufflers, to the sound of a city being scoured clean. Structures vanished under the wave of light, roads and cars swallowed up in an instant. Behind his eyelids, Chrono watched the first row of half-slagged buildings became black silhouettes in a blinding tide before disintegrating. The brunt of it was pointed away from him. Had it not been, Chrono knew their shields would never have held. He wondered if that was skill and intent, or just luck.

It seemed to go on forever, but it could only have been ten seconds or so of huddling tight and praying for the onslaught to be over. As the blast died away and the echoes settled, it was almost a struggle to open his eyes again. Surely, he thought. Nothing could have survived that.

Nothing.

But something had.

The Book’s upper body hung in the air. There was no sign of anything below the waist – Takamachi had blown it clean in half and dispersed the dark fog that had clung to it. The tome and the corrupted Healer were nowhere to be found. From the horrific wound where the Book’s hips had been poured a solid stream of black inky ichor; far more than its torso could possibly have held. It pooled on the ground, bulging and growing upwards into strange, monstrous shapes. Huge worm-like shapes, plated armour and gnashing mouths – already the tumorous mass was the size of a bus, and it was quickly growing.

But the torso looked different. Its missing arm was back, and its face was healed. The dress was still black where the the stream of ichor stained it, but above that the Book was clad in white, and there was something new in its eyes.

Clarity. And purpose.

…

Nanoha gasped, letting out the breath she’d been holding. She’d done it! She’d gotten the shot off! And she was pretty sure it hadn’t hit anyone, though her link to Vesta had been interrupted by the sheer amount of power she’d been using.

Now… where was she?

In front of her was the ripple of a translucent barrier, and beyond it lay a vast dark space. Two huge structures in the corners of her vision; towering things made of glowing geometry and pipelines of light.

There had probably been a third structure right in front of her. Nanoha was guessing on that point, because if so there wasn’t much left of it. Still, the empty chasm between the two huge shapes was filled with thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of the glowing shapes that made the structures up. They were rising; falling upwards like rain in. Far, _far_ up above, she could see a bright rent in the sky that they were being drawn towards, tumbling end over end and colliding with one another as they went.

An annoyed-sounding cough came from behind her. Nanoha wheeled around to face a girl about her age and the Book of Darkness. The red-eyed woman was glaring back at Nanoha. She squeaked, and Raising Heart came up with an Axel Shooter forming.

“Don’t you dare!” snapped the girl, stepping into the line of fire. “You’ve already shot up enough of my book without asking!”

Nanoha blinked at her, belatedly filling in the details. The Book was wearing a simple black dress instead of a complex one, and had none of the tattoos or wild rage of the version Nanoha had been fighting. The four black wings belonged to the girl, not the Book, and now that Nanoha looked at her…

“Yagami Hayate! You’re alright!”

“… yes,” said the girl, slightly mollified by Nanoha’s obvious relief. “And this is Reinforce; the master program of the Book. I renamed her and now we’re working together to stop the defence program. And _you’re_ Takamachi Nanoha; the girl who just blew up one of my Book’s major components. And also my hospital six months ago.”

Nanoha blinked again, and lowered Raising Heart. “… uh… yes, that’s me. You mean the dream thing? I’m very sorry about shooting it; but I had to get free. Um, sorry about the hospital too. Again. And what’s the defence program?” She paused. “Also, just to check; you mean you two had a talk and now she’s on our side, right?”

Hayate glared. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, no!” Nanoha held her hands up defensively. “I believe you! I’ve done that too! From both sides, even! I just want to be sure of what’s going on!”

“Oh.” Hayate looked faintly embarrassed. “Then yes, more or less. I mean, it was a bit more complicated than that, but…”

“I get you,” Nanoha reassured her. “Okay, so where are we and what’s this defence program thing?”

“When you destroyed the Absorption program along with its holding pocket, you were relocated to the only other active dimensional space available by emergency protocols,” the woman called Reinforce said, which Nanoha recognised from half a year of experience with Linith and Precia as quite an informative way of answering the question without actually giving any details. “As to the defence program, you might begin by looking to your right.”

Nanoha glanced over and yelped. The cloud of rubble and the two giant structures weren’t the only ones around, it seemed. There were more that had been behind her; points of a hexagon she’d been facing away from. And the one Reinforce had just pointed her to was...

... wrong. Black tar covered it, leaking from every surface and smothering the light and glow under a stifling crust. Alone of the five structures, it had no pipes or bridges connecting it to the others, and white casting rings surrounded it like prison binds. But the structure next to it; behind Reinforce and Hayate, was almost as covered in the dark gunk. Already the stuff was flowing down the lines and bridges connecting it to the next one over, and the bound structure was extending tar-tendrils towards the binds keeping it contained. The corrupted pipes near them were starting to spread out and link together into a wall – or a cage.

“The defence program of the Tome of the Night Sky,” Reinforce said. “Corrupted long ago into a monster that sees nothing but threats all around. It will run rampant if allowed any freedom; attacking endlessly as long as it has power. That,” she motioned at Raising Heart, “could give it enough power to rage for all eternity.”

“I took control of the Book as an administrator,” Hayate explained, “and cut off its control, but it’s infected my Archival system as well, and it’s trying to take over my Knights. And _you_ blew up my Absorption, which was one of the _un_ infected parts.” She glared. “It’s generated some sort of horrible copies of my Knights, too.”

Reinforce winced. “It is also trying to regain control of the system, Lady Hayate. I have partial control over the outer form, but it is struggling and… attempting to inject commands into the core.”

Nanoha’s lips tightened as she saw the black, barbed tendrils stabbing towards them. They still hadn’t got through the containment, but the white rings were fracturing. “Which one is your Knights?” she asked. Hayate waved towards the one next to Archival. Nanoha studied it for a moment, then nodded.

“Okay. What do we do, and how can I help?”

Hayate narrowed her eyes, then nodded decisively. “Right!” she said. “I’m going to tell the people outside to hold off the fake knights the Defence Program has made. Then Reinforce and me need to start the reinsti... resur... the bringing-them-back process and get the real ones back. _You_ need to keep it off them and us until we’re ready. Which...” She hesitated for a moment, glancing at Reinforce. “Uh. You’re sure this is a good idea?”

Nanoha felt vaguely insulted at that. It sounded like a great idea to her! But the woman nodded slowly, and Hayate turned back to her with a grimace.

“Fine. In that case, Takamachi Nanoha, I _temporarily_ grant you _limited_ system privileges, in my name and by my will.” She pointed at the black-soaked towers. “Reinforce will send you some attack programs. You’re good at shooting and blowing things up. Keep that stuff _off_ my Knights and don’t destroy anything you’re not meant to.”

She caught Nanoha’s eye for the last sentence, a flicker of vulnerability making itself known. “I mean it,” she added, her voice trembling a little. “I wasn’t really using the dream, but my Knights are my family. Don’t hurt them. Please.”

Staff held in her left arm, Nanoha reached out with her right and pumped her fist, a gesture of quiet determination. “I promise,” she said softly. “Now don’t be afraid. We’ll solve this together. Even if I wasn’t here, you’ve got friends outside. Like Chikaze.”

“Chikaze!” Hayate gasped. “Is she-”

Nanoha grinned, a moment of levity. “Her and my mama kept on sending messages to the defence program and distracting it in the fight,” she half-boasted. “So that means you have to get out of here so you can say thank you.” Bringing Raising Heart around, she bent at the knees, preparing to kick off. “And that means that I’m going to save your friends! Are you ready, Raising Heart?”

[Let’s go, mistress! We’ll save them all!]

“You got it!”

_‘Chrono Harlaown!’_ she heard Hayate call as she rose to the top of the dimensional space. _‘Everyone outside! I don’t have control of the three things out there! But I’m trying to bring my Knights back online! If I can do it they’ll help fight the defence program! Hold them off until then!’_

...

The bloated mass of the thing that had been the Book bulged and writhed with inward horrors. The Defence tumour lay on the ground like a beached whale, tapering up in a thinning protuberance until it met the waist of a struggling woman. No longer did she scream or howl at the world; now her efforts were focused on what trapped her. One arm was bare to the shoulder, covered in blooming bruises showed that it had none of the resilience or strength of its twin. Her other arm was engaged with fending off the tendrils and oozing slime from below that was trying to engulf her.

Overhead, an orange-gold comet left a glowing trail as it both chased and was chased. Arf hunkered down in her backpack as Fate cut through the air like a knife. Orange shields meshed around her in an aerodynamic cloak of armour against the monstrous False Knights.

‘Hold them off’, it turned out, was not a very helpful set of orders. For a start, it assumed she was far, far more capable of fighting a Wolkenritter than experience told her she was. And that wasn’t even counting the fact that they were trying to kill her, while the _real_ ones had been holding back.

_‘Again!’_ she ordered. Arf’s chains lashed out towards the gleaming shape of the False Blade ahead of her. It was as much sharp knife as skin; an amalgamation of faces and forms that sometimes drifted apart or overlapped unnaturally. Arf’s chain wrapped around its neck and jerked it back for a second. The bind snapped almost immediately, cut through by a blade edge protruding from its throat.

Something red-hot and roughly spherical whistled past her ear and she jinked away from it, turning her attention backwards again. Twelve Plasma Lancer firing rings hovered around her legs. The air hummed and Bardiche was growing uncomfortably warm, sustaining the relentless hail of golden blade after golden blade. Fate trailed a rapid staccato rhythm of fire that swung back and forth to stay on-target as the False Breaker corkscrewed after her

It wasn’t noticably slowing the monster down.

_‘The Blade’s too sharp!’_ Arf yelled. _‘I can’t get a proper hold on it! Where’s it even going?’_

Fate didn’t answer for a second, busy shifting Bardiche to his scythe form and throwing a pair of Crescent Sabers back at the Breaker. It fell back a little and she turned her attention to the area they were flying over, and the Blade’s path. A gutted building caught her eye as they flew over it, and her blood ran cold.

_‘That’s the hospital!’_ she realised with a chill of panic. _‘It’s going after Nanoha’s family!’_

_‘Testarossa!’_

She didn’t have time to stop, and was too busy trying to line up a shot on the Blade to pay much attention. But she managed a glance to her side, and almost dropped out of the sky in surprise. He looked terrible; sallow-faced and favouring his ribs. But the TSAB spearman who’d taken the Book’s arm off was still clearly combat-ready as he fell in alongside her. Fate was so shocked that it took her a second or two to notice the ferret on his shoulder.

“Shouldn’t you be with a medic?” she asked incredulously. The spearman shrugged laconically.

“Scrya got me upright,” he grunted. “And this is more important than my health. I’ll handle the Blade.”

_‘We can keep it away from the civilians if I help,’_ Scrya added quickly. _‘Chrono and, uh, Vesta are already fighting the Hound. And Captain Grangeitz,_ please _remember what I said about overstraining yourself; I’m not that good a medic and we’re probably going to need you later.’_

_‘Wait, Vesta?’_ Arf put in, alarmed. _‘And Chrono? She’ll kill him!’_

_‘She won’t,’_ Scyra said. _‘Not when Nanoha would be in danger if she did. Now hurry and lead the Breaker away!’_

Fate made a rapid decision and nodded, peeling off at an angle and doubling the Plasma Lancers she was firing at the Breaker. It took the bait, swinging out after her as Grangeitz started gaining on the Blade, and she poured on the speed to pull away from it. Not enough that she’d lose it, but enough to gain some distance and thinking time. Her job was to keep it distracted, or ideally put it down. Unfortunately, that wasn’t as easy a task as it sounded. One hit from the Breaker would shatter Arf’s barriers and do enough damage to cripple her speed, and that was an optimistic guess. It wouldn’t be holding back now like the redheaded girl had been.

It wasn’t a comfortable thought, and it sat so heavily on the mind that she hadn’t come up with anything by the time the flickering shape of the Breaker started to catch up with her again. It wasn’t a completely amorphous blob anymore, and had managed to shape itself into a roughly humanoid shape. But its features flickered like a stuttering hologram, and it was drenched in the black ichor-fog of the Book’s lower body, which dripped from it as it flew and wreathed the enormous head of its hammer. It was bigger than it had been, and from the way it hadn’t even noticed her or Arf’s binds, finesse obviously wasn’t going to work.

Well then. The Nanoha approach it was.

“Bardiche,” she murmured. “Cycle to 40%”

[Yes sir!]

She greeted the False Knight with a Plasma Barret; a dozen golden bolts curving in to strike it from all side at once in an explosion of lightning. The blast blew the dark mist off its body and made it spasm and shriek, but didn’t down it. Chains sprung from Arf’s casting circles to keep it locked in place, and Ring Binds slammed home around its limbs. Fate circled at a wary distance, training the machine-gun barrage of shooting spells from her firing rings on its body as she gathered power for a bombardment spell. The golden bolts scorched deep circles into the thing’s flesh, painted burnt lines along its sides and punched holes through the black mist as it began to form again.

But even corrupted and cut off from its source, her foe was still a Wolkenritter.

The False Breaker roared; its flesh billowing out into a grey-skinned giant of a man; taller even than the TSAB spearman. Its muscles bulged as it ripped its way free from the trap and launched into the air after her with shifting features set in an utterly blank mask. Teeth gritted, Fate turned and sprung into flight again, Arf’s barriers rising around her.

Yagami had better get the real Knights back soon, she thought grimly. Because sooner or later, she was going to leave an opening that Arf couldn’t cover in time.

...

Resurrection was not as simple as flipping a switch.

“Oh Buch der Dunkelheit, erwecke deine Dienerin ‘Wiederherstellung’!”

“Oh Buch der Dunkelheit, dir befehle ich deiner Dienerin ‘Wiederherstellung’ die Autorität zu verleihen, ihre Pflichten an den Wolkenrittern des Buches der Dunkelheit auszuüben!”

“‘Wiederherstellung’, mit der Autorität die dir verliehen worden ist, befehle ich dir, die Gesundheit der Wolkenritter des Buches der Dunkelheit vollständig wiederherzustellen!”

Hayate’s mind whirled as she slammed authorisation after authorisation into place. In a language she knew but had never learned, she opened power transfers between the Tome’s systems. With codes both familiar and alien, she commanded dormant programs to come online and assigned them duties. Above her, pink attack routines lanced out to quarantine regions, purge cancerous code and sometimes burn whole areas.

It was interfering with what she was trying to do. Twice already she’d had to hastily reconfigure the lines that were pumping extra power into Restoral, as the shooting spells tore through rotting conduit-lines and brought down entire routing points. But she had no choice but to adapt and work around the damage that Nanoha was doing. After all, the girl was doing it on Hayate’s own orders.

Reinforce wasn’t any help. Though her avatar still stood in the core-bubble, Hayate could feel her perspective; like another set of eyes in her head – a whole other face, even - that was seeing a completely different view. The Reinforce outside was caught on some enormous mass of flesh and ichor that was attacking her; trying to wrap her up and take over from the outside even as its barbed tendrils tried to infect the core within.

Yes, there would be no help from Reinforce. She was busy.

The problem was, basically, that her Knights were too destroyed for Restoral to fix them, but she wanted them as they were rather than as new instantiations of the template. One or the other she could do easily – repairing them if they were still alive or creating them anew. Restoring them from death _as they had been_...

... well, that was harder. And was going to take some creative thinking. Luckily, she’d come up with a pretty good plan that she was fairly certain might more or less work. And she didn’t have enough time to come up with another one, so she could just get on with trying instead of worrying whether there was a better way.

“Oh Buch der Dunkelheit, ich befehle dir den Wiederherstellungsprozess deiner Wolkenritter einzuleiten, auf daß sie mir dienen mögen.”

The four-part structure that held her Knights lit up like it was New Year. Across the empty gap from it, Restoral was just as bright; a dim glow from deep inside building and building until it filled every rippling surface and curving arch. Code flowed in streams so dense they looked like solid lines, from Restoral to Guardian and from Guardian towards her.

She smiled, or at least bared her teeth. She was drawing vast amounts of power from the Book to do this. The magic that went into remaking her knights was magic that the Defence tumour couldn’t use to fight her!

“Lady Hayate,” Reinforce said, alarmed enough to switch her focus inward. “What are you doing?”

Hayate didn’t spare the attention to reply. She stared up unblinking, her breath caught in her chest, as four Belkan sigils appeared before her spinning lazily in the air. Four shapes flowed up from them; hazy and indistinct. They were grey outlines in the air, nothing more, but Hayate could name each ghostly figure by an instinct that went beyond sight. Something touched her mind; a probing, questioning feeling. It wanted her to make a decision, wanted her to give it something, and to prompt her it sent a sense of _strength_ and _skill_ , _pride_ and _honour_ , _fire_ and...

“Now!” she called. “Oh Buch der Dunkelheit, beende den Wiederherstellungsprozess deiner Wolkenritter! Verwirf was du früher getan hast! Höre meine Befehle und nimm stattdessen das Werk deiner Dienerin ‘Wiederherstellung’ und akzeptiere es als dein Eigenes! Wenn du das getan hast, führe den Wiederherstellungsprozess deiner Wolkenrittern fort!”

The graceful shining tower that was Restoral let out a chime that shook the ground. The grey figures were engulfed in jagged flares of coloured light that burst from the sigils they stood in. Hayate bit her lip until it bled, her eyes hazing over as she _forced_ her kludged-together spell to work.

Generation and repair. One or the other wouldn’t get her what she wanted. Doing neither was unacceptable. But doing _both_... generating a new set of knights and overwriting them with restoral data before the templates were filled...

“Signum,” she whispered, screwing her eyes shut to focus as hard as she could on her Knights, her friends, her _family_. Reinforce’s hand was a firm support on her shoulder, and she could feel the Tome’s power throughout her body; enhancing her body enough that she could stand. “Vita. Shamal. Zafira. _Please_.”

The light died down. Four figures stood before her.

Four figures she recognised.

“Lady Hayate!” Reinforce was _definitely_ alarmed now. “That is not how the functions are meant to be used! Such repurposing is... I fear it was part of how the Defence Programme was corrupted in the first place! You should never carry out such—”

The rebuke fell on deaf ears as Hayate stared, still unable to blink or breathe. They were so stiff. So blank. Like they had been so long ago, when they’d first appeared in front of her. Had it not worked? They looked the same, but had they forgotten everything? Anything? Was it really them?

And then, with the slightest tilt of his head and settling of his shoulders, Zafira’s posture eased down from impassive to quietly impressed. Most people couldn’t have read the difference, but she could! Because they were her knights!

“You know,” he said. “In all the plans we made, all the wild scenarios... we never even considered that you could do something like this.”

He smiled. “But I’m really glad you did.”

Hayate couldn’t wait any longer. She threw herself at him with a sob, and he swept her up in his arms and swung her round into a five-way crush of congratulations, babbled joy and tearful apologies. She was engulfed in the warm softness of Shamal, then struggling to breath as Vita all but crushed her ribcage, then forehead-to-forehead with Signum; loving every second of it...

[Axel Beam]

A pink beam drilled over their heads and reduced something to ash behind them. Hayate didn’t actually see the Wolkenritter move; one second she was sandwiched between and the next there were three bodies between her and the source of the beam, two weapons drawn and a double-layered shield up that she couldn’t even see through.

“Wow,” said Nanoha’s voice from the other side of it. “How did you do that so- okay, never mind. Look, I know about the whole happy-to-see-you-again thing in fights, and I was trying to give you space and keep my shooting down so I didn’t interrupt, but that goo-tendril was getting really close! Sorry! I waited as long as I could!”

Hayate grumbled, but put a hand on Zafira’s arm and nudged Shamal. “It’s okay,” she said wearily. “She’s on our side. The Book absorbed her, she got out of it and now she’s helping fight the Defence Program.”

Her Knights relaxed. Slowly. As Nanoha spun to clear out a few more creeping barbs that were trying to pierce the bubble’s edge they seemed to accept Hayate’s assurance at face value and disregard her, though Hayate could tell they were still tracking her every motion.

Good.

Instead, their attention was on Reinforce, who was staring back at them with reproach, surprise and wonder.

“And this is Reinforce,” Hayate added. “The master program of the Tome of the Night Sky. I renamed her to set her free.” She smiled. “I’m protecting you now. All of you. But I’m still going to need your help.”

“Whatever you say, Hayate,” Vita beamed, saluting. The other Knights followed suit. “What do you need us to do?”

Hayate frowned. “I’m not ordering you. But there are three fakes copying you out there! They’re fighting the TSAB and Nanoha’s friends. And the defence program has sort of half taken over Reinforce’s outside-body. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but if you want to help, I can send you out properly. Once the fake Knights are gone, I’m going to purge the corrupted sections of the Tome and force them out through the rift.” She gestured up to the line of light far above that the floating depress was still leaking through. “Then we can separate them from the Tome and destroy them for good.”

A whoosh of air proceeded Nanoha landing beside them. Clouds of coolant vented from her Device as the slats closed over the Jewel Seed once more. “Woosh,” she managed, waving her staff around trying to help it cool down. “Sorry, Raising Heart! You were getting a bit hot out there!” 

[My master, coolant levels are down to 19%. A refill will be required soon.]

“I know, I’ll try my best to find you some!” She swept a glare over Signum, Vita and Shamal before settling on Hayate. “We’re onto step two?”

Signum made a quiet sound of recognition. “That jawline,” she murmured. “You are your mother’s daughter, little girl.”

Nanoha’s eyes narrowed further. “I might be on your side for now, but I don’t have to like you!” she snapped. “You hurt my mother! More than once! And you attacked Arisa! And _you_ hurt _Fate!_ By hitting her in the back! You put her in hospital!” Her glare swept from Signum to Vita to Shamal, and petered out when it got to Zafira. “And... um... you’re okay, I guess. I don’t think you’ve hurt any of my friends.”

Her rant didn’t get much of a reaction, save a carefully impassive face from Zafira and a roll of the eyes from Signum. “Most people have the good sense to not pick a fight with me a second time when they’re self-taught and can barely generate a barrier jacket,” she said, her sword still held ready between Nanoha and Hayate. “Considering that you are using mana-collation bombardment spells against the Book of Darkness from the inside, you share your mother’s sense. That is good.”

“Huh?” Nanoha blinked at her. For that matter, Hayate blinked at her. She wasn’t aware of how Nanoha blowing up her Tome was a _good_ thing. Necessary, maybe, but...

“We are all mad for trying this,” Signum said bluntly. “You speak of putting a permanent end to the curse of the Book of Darkness. It is madness.”

Hayate shrunk a little. “... you... think so? That we can’t win this?”

Signum hesitated. Or perhaps just paused in thought; giving the question real consideration. She looked around at her fellow Knights, at Nanoha. At Reinforce.

“Mistress,” she said at last. “Your warmth has quelled the curse of the Book for the first time in centuries. We are, if your words are true, aided by some of the strongest and most talented mages I have seen in a dozen manifestations. We, the Wolkenritter, are your loyal knights, and have walked a thousand battlefields in our time. If ever there was a group that could do this, or a time it was possible, it is here and now. It is madness. But it is not, I think, impossible.”

Hayate smiled. “Then I put us in your hands, my Flame General. Lead us well.”

...

Fighting the Mariage in the skies over Akkamar had been a horrible experience. The Galean bioweapons were unnaturally fast and strong; unconstrained by the limitations of muscle and bone. Their limbs could morph into lethal blades, and even when killed they burst into burning chemical sludge.

Yuuno really _really_ wished he was fighting Mariage right now.

The False Blade’s flesh was in a constant ebb and flow of motion. Sharp edges jutted from its skin all over its body; piercing out from its limbs and protruding like spines from its back. Every other movement saw them cut into it, triggering sprays of blood and flame. Zest’s every effort to reach melee range had been fended off by innumerable blades, gouts of fire or both.

It didn’t stop the Blade. It blurred from point to point with bursts of speed, attacking with blasts and cutting arcs of plasma from a flame-wreathed sword. The weapons that protruded from its flesh rocketed out like arrows that tracked Zest unerringly; forcing him to keep his spear moving in a constant guard, and every so often it would switch its sword to a snake-like bladed chain and fill the air around it with whirring, razor-edged metal. Yuuno did what he could with binds and shields, but whatever the deep purple flame bolts it fired at his efforts were; they ate through all the quick-cast shield-structures he knew. They seemed expensive – it only used them when it had to – but if it was running out of energy it was doing so slowly.

And Zest was tiring. He could tell from his position on the man’s shoulder. Oh, he was holding up as well as could be expected, but the clash that had taken the Book’s arm off had not ended well for him. Yuuno had done what he could with Physical Heal, but he was getting more and more worried that there might have been some internal damage he had missed. If they survived this, he was going to personally tie the man to a hospital bed if that was what it took to get him checked over properly.

Right now, though, he had other priorities.

_‘How close are you?’_ he called back as Zest and the Blade circled warily. Yuuno wasn’t sure it was sapient, but it seemed smart enough to have picked up a healthy respect for Zest’s spear.

_‘Nearly there, but Kyouya can’t move very fast.’_ Momoko’s voice sounded worried. If she could see the thing that was trying to get to her and her family, Yuuno couldn’t blame her. There wasn’t much left of the city below – Nanoha’s spell had burnt buildings to nothing and melted the ground. But there were still a few underground parts of the city left in the barrier; parts of the subway hadn’t collapsed yet. One crucial entry was nearby.

_‘You need to move faster,’_ Yuuno broke off for a moment to flinch as Zest rocketed forward, slashing up and across to stop the Blade from moving down. It retaliated by spitting a cloud of fire at him, which Yuuno reflected back. It didn’t seem to hurt it much, but it blinded it long enough for Zest to lodge a pair of orange javelins in its torso and detonate them. They barely avoided the plume of blood as it sprayed out and caught light, and the wave of heat that rolled off the ignition was palpable.

_‘It’s going to make it to the ground sooner or later,’_ he continued. _‘And it’s hyper-focused on you for some reason. You need to be underground where it can’t easily follow. Can you move any- stop it!_

He threw up a shield just in time to see it riddled full of metal as every blade in the creature’s body tore free and launched outward at once. As the bleeding, burning body dropped like a comet towards the Takamachi family, the sphere of sharpened steel turned in midair and closed in on the pair of them. Zest swore.

“Hold on,” he ordered, and loaded two cartridges. Yuuno squirmed under his ripped and singed greatcoat; the battered fields of the Barrier Jacket expanding to cover him, as Zest concentrated for a moment a shell of deep orange light formed around him. It detonated outward in a shockwave that blew the oncoming arrow-blades away, and Zest dropped after their enemy.

But they were too slow. Yuuno could tell, even before they hit the ground, that they weren’t going to be fast enough. It would reach the Takamachis before they would reach it, and in the few seconds it would take to catch up...

... something bright and swift and shining came flashing in from the side and struck it before it reached the ground.

The impact blew it off-course, sending it hurtling down with enough force to send fragments skittering away from the crater across the glassed surface of the ground. Another projectile hit it before it managed to rise, throwing it back further, and two more homed in from either side to catch it in a dual explosion. As it was blown forwards towards Zest’s landing spot, Yuuno caught a glimpse of the first two missiles, still sticking out of its skin.

Gleaming metal arrows, fletched with purple.

“Stop trying to fight it up close,” advised a woman’s voice; deep and accented. “It’s a rabid dog. Put it down from a distance.”

Zest turned and tensed. Yuuno followed suit. It was the Blade – the _real_ Blade; human-shaped and pink-haired and wearing her white coat and purple tabard; holding a formidable metal recurve bow. She stared down at her false, malformed facsimile with a mixture of disgust and disappointment. “To fight a mage who presents a challenge is a rare chance,” she said, lip curling. “I’ve often dreamt of fighting an equal; a true peer. _This_ , though... this is just a mad beast. The blade, and not the general.”

A casting sigil formed above her hand, and another arrow dropped out of it. She strung it and drew. “Still, disappointment or no, destroying it is necessary. I won’t have that woman’s daughter blame my mistress for her death. She would be… volatile.” She glanced at them, blue eyes narrowed. “You did receive the broadcast? We fight together now, against the Book’s corruption.”

“I heard,” Zest said. There was a bubbling rasp to his voice that set Yuuno’s fur on edge. “But the last time we met, you tried to kill me in defence of that corruption.”

“I assure you,” the Blade retorted. “I was not trying to kill you. It would have ended differently if I hadn’t been holding back.”

The false Blade shrieked, staggering upright and oozing burning blood. They put their conversation on hold in favour of bombarding it with a volley of arrows and javelins. Zest was moving carefully, doing most of his casting through circles rather than throwing the orange lances, but the true Blade moved with the fluid efficiency of a trained soldier. There were no wasted movements that Yuuno could see. She nocked, aimed and fired in a chained set of motions so natural that they blended into one.

Under the battery of projectiles, the half-formed thing first tried to shield itself, then dodge, then take cover. None of its attempts worked. The Blade seemed to be able to generate an endless supply of arrows that curved around obstacles and homed in on their target; knocking her counterpart’s own projectiles aside. Zest’s javelins expanded into tight binds or detonated where they struck; sending glassy shrapnel up. The world was coming apart around it as the Dimensional Sea broke through. The False Blade lost a limb when a well-placed shockwave from Zest sent it through a plume of violet exotic radiation.

Desperately, the monster gathered its strength and broke for the Takamachi family, gathering a hellish glow about itself as it flew. Yuuno squinted, concentrated and focused. If he was right about what it was trying to do...

He was. As it went down, screaming, with a dozen shafts of steel through its body and orange clamps crushing every limb, it spat one last hellish fireball at its prey that grew as it flew.

Yuuno cast, and the glowing ball of star-bright fire came apart in the air; a faint green field pulling and stretching it out into nothing more than heat haze. He breathed a sigh of relief. It was down. They were safe.

“... what was that?” The Blade seemed mildly surprised, looking at Yuuno rather than Zest for the first time since she’d arrived.

_‘A thermo-mana conversion field,’_ he explained, panting. _‘To turn the heat back into mana. I was trying to set one up earlier, but I couldn’t focus for long enough while it was moving.’_

“Hmm.” She seemed to accept that, turning her attention back to Zest and frowning. “You fought well, knight of the Bureau, but you should sit the rest of the fight out. You’re gravely injured. Had that truly been me, it would have killed you.”

Zest rumbled menacingly. “I’m not so easy to kill. And it’s Grangeitz. Captain Zest Grangeitz.”

The Blade looked him up and down, and gave the faintest of smiles. For some reason, it made Yuuno’s fur prickle far more than her sudden appearance or her hail of arrows.

“I am Signum,” she murmured, “and perhaps you are not.” Her eyes turned back to the huge, bloated mass that loomed back the way they had come from. It was the size of a small building now, and still growing. Two shapes buzzed around the tiny woman protruding from its top, slashing away the pseudopods grasping at her with white spikes and green wire.

“Unfortunately,” she added, “neither will that be.”

...

The spearman – Grangeitz – was obviously in bad shape. Signum could hear the damage in his breathing and see it in the way he bobbed in midair; his flight spell wavering unsteadily. What had hurt him, she couldn’t be sure of. Perhaps the cursed Book, perhaps one of the cursed effigies of the Wolkenritter.

Whatever it had been, she hoped he wasn’t going to be stubborn about it. For all that he had some overly romanticised notions of Belkan honour, his heart was that of a true knight. Which unfortunately tended to correlate with being an utter nightmare of a patient who would outright refuse medical treatment while there was still a fight to be won. She and Vita were the same.

“Ferret,” she ordered.

_‘Scrya,’_ he corrected. _‘Yuuno Scrya.’_

Signum didn’t care. “Give him another shot of magic to the ribs and get him to the ground.” She switched her attention to Grangeitz. “You can stay with that girl’s family for security. You’re in no condition for serious combat, but you should be enough to dispatch any Mariage units still on the battlefield.”

“Fair,” he agreed. Well, that was a nice surprise. “But I’ll want a sparring match with you when all this is over.” He coughed, letting a little of the pain he’d been hiding show. “I’ll provide what support I can, though I’m not a great shooter.”

Signum felt his eyes linger on her as they parted ways. She and Scrya flew towards the behemoth-tumour that had bled from the wound Takamachi had blasted in the side of the Book. Vita, the Testarossa girl and her familiar fell in beside them. Vita’s dismissive expression hid the same unsettled discomfort that Signum herself felt after seeing her doppelgänger, and Testarossa was favouring her right shoulder, but neither seemed seriously injured.

“The false Breaker?” she asked, just in case.

“Dead,” Vita reported. “Sparky here wore it halfway down before I got there. And that thing it was swinging around wasn’t much against the real Graf Eisen. Still didn’t go down easily, though.”

Signum nodded. “The false Blade is dead too, and the Healer was destroyed before it could form.” One small mercy there, she thought. Fighting a monstrous version of Shamal would have been a nightmare. _‘Harlaown. The false Blade and Breaker are down. Grangeitz is stable, but out of the fight. The Hound?’_

_‘Gone underground,’_ the boy replied. Signum traded a worried look with Vita. _‘But it’s wounded badly. We managed to herd it into a trap spell and blow it nearly in half. Even if it survived, it’s half-frozen and barely in one piece - no condition to fight. We’re returning to assault the Book proper now.’_

“It’s not dead,” Vita said. It wasn’t an opinion. They both knew Zafira. “What’s it doing?”

“Biding its time,” Signum said firmly. Zafira wasn’t as subtle as Shamal, but he was wolf-shaped for a reason. He had the instincts of a hunter.

_‘Going after the Takamachis, maybe?’_ guessed Testarossa’s familiar. _‘If it’s too injured to win a fight and it knows it; it might be planning to help its master out by sending power instead.’_

Her mistress slowed a little, looking back uncertainly. Signum motioned her forward.

“Grangeitz will take care of it if it does,” she said. “We deal with the greater threat. This vile _tumour_ that has killed our masters and subverted our honour.” She pursed her lips, forcing the rage, the _violation_ at the sight of the False Blade back down inside. She had four strikers capable of bombardment – herself, Vita, Harlaown and Testarossa. Fire, force, ice and lightning.

That was enough for a plan. With a moment’s thought, it was enough for a _good_ plan. One that stood a fairly good chance of working.

“What is the black ooze?” Harlaown asked her, eyes narrowed as he cast a custom cooling spell on his dented Device. “What are its capabilities and weaknesses?”

_‘The tar-like substance is the Ink System of the Book. It is an amorphous computational substrate. The Defence programme is trying to emulate lost functionality with it and so rebuild itself in realspace,_ ’ she explained. _‘It can do almost anything, but each configuration comes with its own weaknesses.’_

The boy nodded, bringing up additional sensor windows.

_‘I’ll take lead on the assault,’_ she ordered. _‘Vita, we’re starting with a spread and burn. We know how Ink adapts. We can guide its adaptations. Testarossa, Harlaown; follow my directions.’_

“Hah!” Vita pulled up. “I get what you have in mind,” she called as they pulled ahead of her. “I’ll start off, then. Be ready for it!”

Signum flashed her a wave of acknowledgement and sped up. Testarossa matched her speed effortlessly. _‘You two be ready with bombardment spells,’_ she told the two children. _‘Harlaown, lock it down with ice. Testarossa; you’ll be using lightning. As much as you can.’_ Laevatein was still in its bow form, and she let off a couple of probing arrows as she flew over the Book. Testarossa followed suit, peppering it with a rapid-fire chain of crackling bolts.

Neither had much effect on the tumour.

What had started out with the mass of a car and grown to the height of a house was now the size of a hill. Had any buildings survived Takamachi’s second blast, it would have towered over them, and the tendrils it had extruded were wide enough to fill a street at the base. It seemed blind to the open dimensional rifts around it; cracks in the sky and rents in the air that spewed purple fire and exotic radiation plumes. Plumes which Signum’s threat detector marked as dangerous even to the likes of her.

Shamal and Zafira had their hands full protecting the human torso attached perilously to the uppermost part of the central tendril; tiny and frail against the enormity of what was below. The master pro- no, she corrected herself. Reinforce. Her fellow Knights were fighting flat out to protect the newly named construct. They ducked, weaved, slashed, cut, shot and shielded as the tendrils lashed in. Tarry ichor rained down with each rent or severed limb, becoming thick liquid that seemed to reach for them even as it fell.

Belkan casting sigils covered the blob’s surface; each one casting a different spell. It was as well that they seemed to be on automatic, Signum realised, because if the creature could concentrate and aim the destruction being discharged from its flanks; nothing within range would stand a chance. The Defence program was too damaged to be the threat it should have been. When everything was a threat, it couldn’t prioritise targets properly. 

The spells of the Wolkenritter were absent from its repertoire, at least. That truly would have been challenging.

_‘Um,’_ said Scrya from her shoulder. _‘When the Breaker said she’d go first…’_

Signum took one look upwards and sped up to her maximum. Testarossa matched her speed; confused at first until she glanced up and saw the red triangle covering the sky above the corrupted Book. They pulled out to circle the huge form at a safe distance, and Signum saw Harlaown and the cat-familiar doing the same opposite them.

She could also see Vita in the distance; a casting triangle hovering in front of her with its face parallel to the ground. A triangle linked to the enormous one in the sky.

A triangle she brought her hammer down on with a mighty shout.

_‘Himmelhammer!’_

The enormous triangle above the Book erupted. A pillar of red force punched down; the bone-shattering force of Vita’s swing magnified a thousandfold and dropped from the heavens. Shamal and Zafira leapt to the tiny human figure at the Book’s highest point; wreathing her in green-white shields that cut a tiny channel of calm into the heart of the spell. 

The rest of the Book’s tendrils weren’t so lucky. They were punched down under the column of force like paper under a piston; bursting as they were driven into the ground. The half-liquid mass of the creature bulged and flattened; spreading out like a balloon filled with water as it desperately grew armour and internal reinforcement to cope with the pressure. So great was the force of the blow that the ground splintered and cracked; pushed down into a depression a hundred metres across.

Tarry ink sprayed everywhere. It burst from the sides of the Book; the firing sigils on its flanks rupturing explosively. It sprayed out from the remains of the vast tendrils. A huge bulge of material surged up the central tendril and ran into a wall of white spikes. For a moment Signum’s heart leapt as it popped. But no. Within the ichor was a slender stem of metal wire that still engulfed the true Book’s lower body.

Oh, and popping that bulge added even more to the grasping, animate mass of black tar that was spraying out in every direction.

_‘Shields!’_ Signum roared. Green sprang up around her and she widened her circle to avoid the worst of the deluge. Orange light flickered up around Testarossa, and blue around Harlaown. Vita was still far enough out to be safe.

_‘Bombardment spells after me!’_ she continued. _‘Testarossa; use electricity and wait for it to break the crust. Harlaown; take your time charging up and then freeze it solid.’_

_‘Right,’_ Testarossa nodded fiercely, falling back to take the third point of a triangle around the Book. Signum gave it a few more seconds to adapt, and loosed her arrow.

[Fallender Glutregen]

One arrow became a hundred droplets of fire. And then two hundred, and then four, and then eight. The cone of fiery rain fell upon the Book before it could pull its mass back together from the flattened state Vita had left it in; leaving it thinly spread and rich in surface area. The half-formed plates of chitin and metal it had created to protect itself glowed red and then white under the heat; melting and charring as it scrabbled to adapt. There was more metal inside it, Signum realised; metal that was glowing just as hot as the outer sections, burning the creature from the inside. She watched dispassionately as it hammered on the inside of its own armour; the protective plates having turned into lethal insulators. Cracks appeared throughout the crust of slag and it spat out glowing wires to its surroundings, shedding heat through superconductors. Perfect.

It also spat them at its attackers. Less perfect.

_‘Incoming!’_ shouted Harlaown as the wires homed in like striking snakes. Scrya threw up a barrier that stopped the first three, but it glowed red-hot and failed as the fourth slammed into it. Signum cursed.

_‘No barriers!’_ Harlaown yelled before she could. _‘It’s trying to dump heat!’_ Testarossa was dodging, as far as she could see, but she was bigger and slower. She snapped Laevatein out to parry and hissed as it cut through the superheated wire. Even fractions of a second were enough to heat her sword red-hot, and she gritted her teeth as she felt her palm burn.

_‘Testarossa!’_ she ordered, just as the distant whine of the girl’s Device reached its peak. _‘Now!’_

[Thunder Smasher]

Electric gold engulfed them all. Testarossa’s spell started as a solid beam, but it split and forked like a tree as it travelled; every branch a charged bolt. Signum pulled her sword back, but she needn’t have bothered. The superconductive wires drew the lightning like iron filings to a magnet. They ignored Signum completely, and the tumour _screamed_. Signum caught a snapshot view of Shamal holding a green barrier over Reinforce, insulating her from the electricity. And this time, she was ready for the Book’s retaliation.

_‘Go high!’_ she shouted. _‘Barriers! Now!_

The Book reacted to the current ripping through its body the only way it could. It reverted its body to tar and expelled every bit of metal and conductive wire within it. The air around it became a storm of shrapnel as the circling mages rocketed upwards. Whirring metal support braces, razor-sharp wire nets, red-hot flecks of molten metal and rods still sparking with electric charge all shot out like bullets. Scrya raised a barrier, but he couldn’t absorb the force of everything coming at them, and Signum’s sword skills were put to the test as she parried and dodged for her life. She heard Testarossa cry out and Harlaown swear, but there was no attention to spare for anything except her defence.

_‘Harlaown! Ice!’_ she called as the air started to clear, and prayed he was still in a fit state to fire.

[Cryo Cannon]

Chrono swooped low to sweep a wide blast of blue light over the tar as it lunged for them. Where it touched, black tar calcified. Amorphous computing substrate collapsed into its groundstate. Tendrils crackled to a stop in midair. The sigils reforming on the flanks were trapped and incomplete. The central stem, Signum saw, had discharged all its metal, and from the looks of things Reinforce had almost pulled free. There was only a slender limb of tar still wrapped around her legs; not yet frozen, that Shamal and Zafira were hacking at. The ice reached the bottom of the stem and started to crawl up its length, and Vita came in like a missile; hammer cocked to deliver the final blow.

_‘Stop her!’_

The scream came from Testarossa; always so quick to react to sudden changes. To her credit; Vita tried to brake, and pulled up sharply. But she couldn’t pull the same level of high-speed turn as the young mage.

A rippling crack echoed out across the shattered city as the Book broke its own back; spitting out hundreds of frozen chunks to scatter uselessly over the landscape and free up a hinge across its breadth.

And like the jaws of a titanic beast, it swung shut on Vita and engulfed her.

…

Within the folded space of the Book, things were developing about as might be expected.

“Axel Shooter! Axel Shooter! Round Shield! Axel Beam! Raising Heart, cycle to 65%! Divine Barret! Sunrise Flash! Axel Shooter!”

Which would be more encouraging if Nanoha had expected something other than chaos and screaming.

The young girl was pushed to her limits. She flew through the dark space, and circled the shrinking, leaking confines of their core-bubble in a constant spiral. Rising and falling and pulling in and out, she flew in programmed evasive patterns to dodge the defence program’s extrusions. Again and again she cast, sending shot after shot and lance after lance of pink light into the black barbed tendrils that pierced the thin shell of the core. She cast until her voice was hoarse. Until her hands were numb. Until the shapes and forms and numbers of her spells were so etched into her mind that she thought she’d _dream_ of them.

She really missed Vesta.

It was actually a little frightening to realise how much she’d come to rely on her familiar. Without a second pair of eyes at her back, without a close-range bodyguard and illusionary support to hide her shots and blur her true location, she was having to do a lot more work to stay in the fight. Raising Heart was running far too hot, and she was using an experimental spell to dump heat without using any of her perilously low supplies of coolant. Her own reserves were running perilously close to dry – if not for the Jewel Seed in her Device, she’d be close to exhaustion. As it was, she had magic enough for days, but the ache behind her eyes and burning feeling in her fingers was taking no small effort to push through.

Still. As far as she could tell, they were very expensively winning. The bubble that defined the core was tattered and torn in a hundred different places, surrounded by a brittle black spiderweb lattice that formed a spherical cage. It stemmed from Defence and Archival, but both were taking a pounding of their own. The lattice-cage was splintering; not just from Nanoha’s shots but from simple lack of material. The two corrupted superstructures were similarly cracked, and suffering for their separation. Every time they tried to reconnect, Hayate would slam down a buffer between them and reduce their efforts to ash.

And speaking of Hayate…

_‘How long?’_ Nanoha called, clenching her teeth as she sent a spreading flower of Axel Shooters to detonate along three crucial support beams in the lattice. A chunk as large as the front wall of her house was sent tumbling upwards towards the rift in the sky. It had grown a lot bigger. Ice crystallised around it now, where fire and lightning had lit the darkened skies before.

_‘Working on it!’_ Hayate shouted back. She hovered at the centre of the ragged space; glowing white with dark wings spread wide. Code surrounded her; a pillar of white glyphs rotating lazily around her as her hands moved across it with the hesitant haste of a novice in a crisis situation. _‘It’s got so many backdoors that some of them are backdoors for each other! I can’t purge it till all its hooks are out of the system!’_

_‘Well work faster!’_ Nanoha urged her. _‘I’ll hold out for as long it takes, but this bubble is getting very full of holes, and I don’t know what happens when it pops!’_ She yelped as another questing tendril shot towards her like an arrow; lengthening and thinning behind a wickedly sharp tip. It barely missed her leg before she tagged it with a purge routine that turned it to grey vapour. That was what she got for not paying attention.

Something shifted. A rumbling crack echoed around them as the rift expanded; jagged lines cutting deeper into the dark sky as it almost doubled in length and width. Hayate cried out in pain, and Nanoha sent a surge of power to strengthen the bubble wall. But the lattice didn’t attack. In fact, the tendrils seemed to be turning upwards, to where a red star was falling from the rift.

… wait. That wasn’t a star.

The Breaker tumbled down and smashed through a dense chunk of lattice before catching herself. She was covered in crushed ice, badly bruised and her jaw looked broken, but for all that she still seemed ready and willing to fight. A flick of her wrist had her hammer expand into the enormous block of metal Nanoha had seen before, and she eyed the lattice up like a wolf eyeing up a steak.

_‘Vita, wait!’_ Hayate called; real fright colouring her voice. _‘It’s dangerous! Be careful!’_

Vita scoffed, dropped and swung, shattering a car-sized chunk of lattice into fragments. _‘It’s fine,’_ she spat scornfully. _‘It can’t attack me any more than it can Absorb me. Its systems don’t recognise me as being any different to it. And if it broke them to target me, it’d- whoa!’_

Only Nanoha’s Axel Beam saved her from getting skewered as a dozen sharp-tipped tendrils lunged for her. She dispatched those that survived with a few brutal swings, and tossed half a dozen metal balls up to orbit around her.

Nanoha and Hayate glanced around worriedly. Something was changing in the way the defence program’s extrusions were acting. They were squirming more. Bloating and losing the sense of united purpose they’d had. Turning on each other.

_‘… then it would be even dumber than I thought it was!’_ Vita finished, half-angry and half-triumphant. _‘Because now it has one hell of an autoimmune problem to deal with! Hayate, this’ll make it even meaner - it’ll attack itself and anything else wherever there’s activity! Watch out!’_

She spun to smash another extrusion from the lattice, which was now a shrieking web of barbs stabbing at one another; hungry mouths and gnashing blades forming from the mass to bite at itself. Loading a cartridge, Vita shot towards the looming superstructure of the Defence Program like a furious pinball as her hammer began to glow red-hot.

Hayate squeezed her eyes shut and ignored the fresh wave of chaos that had broken out around her. In this state, submerged in the veins and arteries of the Tome’s core code, her senses were expanded far beyond the normal human ones. The hum of Nanoha’s Jewel Seed was a scream; setting off alarms that she only half-understood. The damage the defence program was taking both outside and in was a caterwauling wail, and this fresh mutilation of its systems echoed in her ears like a shrieking whistle inside her skull.

She had the mother of all headaches already. Only the joyful feeling of finally understanding how everything worked was keeping her going.

But the new layer of warnings brought salvation. The labyrinthine network of backdoors and contingencies and undocumented blackboxes connected to Defence was turning on itself like a feral animal. Huge regions of her white sector map were turning into red bloodbaths of compromised code. Outside, she could feel the mass that was trapping Reinforce tearing itself apart; forming fangs and cannons to tear chunks out of its own organs and sending others into hypergrowth that crushed everything around them.

Reinforce was getting closer and closer in her head. Hayate knew, with instinct that was half hers and half granted, that they were on the verge of something that was meant to happen. All she had to do…

All she had to do…

… was wait…

… and aim…

… and act.

A white wire sprang out from her hand in a casting that Shamal would have been proud of, flashing upwards through the debris and ongoing battlefield. It sought, struck, and coiled around a single, specific bridge in the cracked and crumbling structure; exposed by the violent growth and war of those around it.

It wrenched. Outside, the last coil of tar around Reinforce’s legs dissolved. Shamal and Zafira sprang back as a vast casting triangle appeared beneath her, blocking her off from the hulking form of the defence program. White light ran over her, and her appearance shifted as Hayate’s body dropped down into the core proper.

Unison. And with it, the last thing she needed to do.

“Buch des Nachthimmels!” she shouted. “Deine Diener ‘Verteidigung’ und ‘Archiv’ sind verräterisch! Entziehe ihnen ihre Autorität, leere ihre Kassen und wirf sie für immer aus!”

The core-structure whose summit she’d been standing on glowed blinding white in response, and the shifted space collapsed like an imploding star.

…

The world bent in on itself and dissolved like an oil wash painting drenched in solvent. And then it rebuilt itself, folding out around Nanoha as though she were at the centre of a complicated origami piece that was spreading out to form the sky, the ground, her friends…

“Vesta!” she called happily as her familiar came into view. “Fate, Yuun-urk!”

Vesta cut her off from any further greetings by cannoning into her and wrapping her up in a bone-creaking hug.

“You’re okay,” she whispered, pulling back long enough to run a rapid scan over Nanoha for any sign of injury before crushing her in a tight embrace again. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay, don’t _ever_ do that again, I don’t care if it wasn’t your fault, you’re okay, you’re okay…”

Nanoha wormed an arm out to hug her back. “I’m okay,” she agreed. “And we won. I think. Have we won?”

“We… haven’t exactly won,” Hayate’s voice came from behind her. “Well, I mean. Not quite yet.”

Pulling back from Vesta, Nanoha looked around. Fate and Arf had dropped in beside her, and Fate offered her a small smile as Nanoha saw her. It didn’t look like much on the surface, but Nanoha could see the relief it was hiding, and she held out a hand to squeeze Fate’s. Fate squeezed back gratefully.

To her other side, Yuuno and Chrono were watching her warily. She offered Yuuno a reassuring grin and he nodded back; though tension still haunted his face.

And in front of them, Hayate stood on a white casting triangle; backed by the Wolkenritter. She’d changed again – she still had the black wings, but her hair had turned golden and one of her eyes was a pale crystal blue. The black dress of her Barrier Jacket had gained a white overcoat, though it was missing an arm. Frowning on a sudden suspicion, Nanoha checked the field strength in her HUD, and… yes, it was weaker there. The same arm that the Book had lost against Zest. And the eye that hadn’t changed colour was the same one the Book had lost. Though hadn’t that been in the illusion? It was hard to pinpoint exactly what had been real and what had been false.

“What exactly did you do?” Chrono asked. “We heard that last command, and…” he gestured downward, where what Nanoha had initially taken to be some sort of hill was crumbling. Tar and chitin and metal and glowing blocks fell off its disintegrating slopes and dissolved into mana as it shrunk. Around it, the city was a blasted plain.

She winced. _‘Mama?’_

_‘Nanoha! Are you alright? Captain Grangeitz says the Book ate you!’_

_‘I’m fine! It tried to suck me into an illusion, but I realised it wasn’t real and got out. Are you all okay?’_

“Takamachi!”

She glared at Chrono, and heard Vesta snarl from just behind her. He glared right back. “Did you even hear what Yagami said? We still have a fight to win. Talk later.” He pointed downwards. “Look.”

The hill-monster was still falling apart, but it was starting to reveal two shapes inside it that weren’t. One of them was stationary; a mound of ichor-soaked books that was bleeding oil onto the ground around it and reshuffling itself with a desperate sort of futility.

But the other was moving, thrashing, struggling against the crumbling mass that confined it and clearing a space for itself. It was a horribly distorted parody of the human form - of _Reinforce’s_ form; silver-haired and black-robed. It had grotesquely long, thin limbs that it crawled on, spider-like and a body two or three times the size of a man; stretched out unnaturally and covered in armour, casting sigils and lashing tentacles of wire and tar. Its head stretched forward on a long and flexible neck; hungry eyes sweeping back and forth in search of something.

And it was sick. It was wrong. Black ooze seeped from countless sores on its face and limbs. The limbs were asymmetrical, one of them so thin and stick-like that it could barely put weight on it. Half-formed legs and arms sprouted from its side, like it wasn’t quite sure how many limbs a human should had or possibly hadn’t made its mind up about which ones to grow to full size.

It was a child’s drawing of Reinforce, seen only from a distance. 

“I purged Archival and Defence,” Hayate said quietly. “Cut all of their links and threw them out entirely. It was the only way to stop the corruption from taking over the Tome again. I thought they’d break if I did that.” She bit her lip. “But they didn’t.”

“Um,” said Yuuno. “When you say ‘Archival’… do you mean the records of everything the Book knows? That big black mass that’s sitting still down there next to the corrupted defence program? That Archival?”

All eyes turned to the thrashing shape of Defence. Looked at with that in mind, it did seem to be thrashing towards its partner.

“Isolate Defence! Keep it away from Archival!” Signum snapped, her words edging out Chrono’s. “Zafira, Vita, hit Defence now while it’s stunned! Shamal, cordon Archival!” These words seemed almost a reflex, and it was only after she gave the orders to her fellow Knights that she seemed to pause to consider her other assets. “We’ll focus on the Defence program. I need Archival sealed!”

“The library of the Book of Darkness is supposed to be where it stores the spells and the mana drained from mages,” Yuuno said quickly, looking to Hayate for confirmation.

She shook her head. “Not exactly. Spells go to Archival, but the mana is spread around a lot more. There’s a lot of mana in Archival, though, because it’s where spells were built.”

“Right! Well, the Defence program is probably mana-hungry, if it works like similar Old Belkan tomes. Cut away from everything else, it has limited reserves.”

“I blew up Absorption inside the Book,” Nanoha contributed, “and that bit didn’t have any gloop on it. That means it probably can’t drain mages on its own, since it doesn’t know how.”

Yuuno nodded, even as an explosion shook the world. Down below, Vita was laying into the Defence programme. It hadn't fully restarted yet, and its movements were still slow and clumsy. “Then it’s going to need mana, and badly!”

Signum inclined her head. “Harlaown, you bear a sealing Device. Lead these children and my lady, and seal the Archival program. I will join my fellow Knights in keeping the Defence program away. We owe it centuries of suffering.” She turned and saluted Hayate with her blade. “My lady, it has been an honour.” And with that said, she fell like a comet, fires trailing as she slammed into the oversized monstrous female.

Fate stared at Chrono. “Orders?” she said softly. 

“Scrya, Arf, set up a secondary defensive perimeter behind the Healer’s efforts! Takamachi, do as much damage as possible to Archival! Testarossa, Vesta, help her, but be ready to counter-attack if the Defence program gets past the Knights.” He took a breath, and turned to Hayate. “You. Did you purge Archival in full, or do you still have access to the spells within the Tome?”

Hayate frowned. “Reinforce says… we lost about four in ten spells forever,” she reported after a moment. “But about half of the rest can be recovered with a bit of work, and I have access to the other half right now.” She paused. “And she says yes, there are sealing spells in the ones I have access too.”

Chrono looked grim. “Good. Then we’ll seal it.”

Hanging back, Nanoha squeezed Raising Heart. The vents were open, but there was no coolant venting and the central gem was cracked. She brought her up to kiss the ruby-red core. It was hot enough that it burnt her lips a little even through her Jacket, and she could feel her fingers blistering. One of the tines was warped along its length, and the very tip was broken off. “Raising Heart, status report,” she ordered.

[My master. System warning. Primary coolant levels at 0%. Secondary coolant levels at 0%. Emergency coolant levels at 4%. Emergency heat management mode activated. Custom Emergency Mode ‘Really Emergency Mode 2’ activated. Primary processor in state Orange. Backup processor in state Green,] the gem stated, the light of the Jewel Seed pulsing along with its words.

“Just a little longer,” she promised the Device. “Then we’ll get you all fixed up and polished and get you all the coolant you want. But we need to finish this.”

[I understand, my master.]

“So cycle as high as you can still manage, okay? We’ll hit this monster with everything we’ve got!”

[Got it! Cycle to 68%!]

…

There was something pure and simple about this fight, Zafira felt. For once, their foe was unquestionably evil. It was not a matter of honour, where a knight might have to follow orders that he would rather not. It was not a matter of survival, the bloody conflicts when foes were closing in where every blow was struck to win another moment of life. It was not their unpleasant self-appointed duty to save Hayate, struggling with unexpected sentiments of guilt and shame as they went against their master’s orders to try to save her life.

No, this time they were fighting the corruption of the very Book they served. They were fighting the manifestation of the system that had wiped their memories and left them unaware of what would happen when they completed the Book. They were fighting the thing that had rampaged across dimensional space countless times. They were fighting the reason the four of them were viewed as monsters. They were fighting the thing that had been killing Hayate.

Today was absolution, of sorts.

He kept low, darting between half-melted lumps of rubble as he flanked the Defence program in wolf form. Plumes of violet flame and washes of exotic radiation made this unsafe, but allowed him to hide himself in the backwash from the Dimensional Sea. 

Up above, Vita held the skies. Whenever the tumour tried to launch itself up to gain speed and height, she was there. Her hammer fell time and time again, pulping its limbs and smashing it down into the ground. Glass shattered under its bulk as time and time again as Vita denied it its advance. It could not approach the Archives without coming under a rain of hammer blows and so it wasted time, swatting with bombardment spells at the red comet above.

If given time to deal with her, it could have. But in front of it stood Signum, interposing herself between the tumour and Archival. Burning steel scourged her foe as she goaded it with her whip-sword. Leaping back, she dodged an overhead smash only to coil her blade around one of its legs. The wounds bit deep, oozing tar-blood, and the tumour screamed out in agony. Falling forwards, it pulled off a peculiar cartwheel that ended with one of its arms becoming a new leg and its malformed head migrating up its body. It lunged for the Flame General, only to be met by a perfect leaping stop-thrust that speared it through the throat. White-hot heat flowed through Laevatein and a plume of flame burst out its back, burning away some of the mass of stubby arms and chains.

And then there was Shamal. The tumour could not see her, but it must have known she was there. Who else could litter the glassy ruins with traps? Razor-wires severed flesh and limbs, binds locked it down just when it most needed to avoid Vita or Signum, and perhaps worse, Shamal wielded an AMF as a surgeon might a scalpel. It needed mana more than anything and that was the air she denied it.

Every time it had to heal, every time it had to cast a spell, every second it spent in Shamal’s killing fields, the tumour was using mana it could ill afford. 

But those were the other knights. They were not him. He had his own role to play in their intricate dance. They had centuries of experience on their side and needed little more than a few telepathic words to know what to do.

And so as Vita smashed the tumour down, breaking its leg, Zafira broke from his cover. Half way through his charge he shifted to human form. Two cartridges left. Enough for his purposes. All he really needed.

“Riesenkraft!” he roared, steam venting from both of his Device-gauntlets. White light swelled around his arms and chest. With a pounce he wrapped his arms around the staggered monster, so much bigger than him, and started to _squeeze_ as he barrelled it to the ground.

Above him, Vita fell, hammer held high. “That’s it!” she yelled. “Hey, you! Tödlichschlag!”

Zafira felt the impact through the tumour’s body like a blow to the gut. He grinned despite that. “Ready?” he roared.

“Ready!” Signum snapped back.

Twisting and lifting from underneath its bulk, still boosted by Riesenkraft, he got his feet under him. The cool green magic from Shamal swelled up through him. The monster was stunned from Vita’s impact, and didn’t realise what he was doing until too late. 

And then he threw it.

Razor-wires and burning arrows from Shamal and Signum punched through the body and propelling it further. It hit the husk of a shattered building and smashed through, bouncing as it went, and was caught in a jet of purple-white fire beyond. The sizzling scent of cooking meat and burning metal filled the air as it jackknifed back from the D-Space breach. Wincing, Zafira flipped to his feet and set chase. He was the Hound. He came from unexpected angles and flanked foes, hitting them where they least expected it then crippling their ability to run. That had got them a good five hundred metres. And distance here was time.

Time for his master to win this war.

…

The barrier-copy of Uminari City was a wasteland. Open rifts crisscrossed the sky. Flaring vents of violet fire opened and closed intermittently from random points in the air; cooking the ground still further and leaving drifting mana-hazes visible even to the naked eye. Parts of the landscape were simply disintegrating, leaving ominous-looking deep-violet panes of _something_ in their place.

“Divine Buster!” 

“Plasma Smasher!”

Once again, pink and yellow punched into the bulk of the archive, blowing chunks out of it. It tried to reconfigure itself around the damage, but this system was far less active than the Defence program. Slowly it was trying to heal, but the constant impacts were doing progressively more and more damage.

There was a bit of Nanoha that felt like a bully, hammering away at the Archival program like this. Not a very big bit. It was a pile of strange brick-like books that kept on trying to reconfigure itself into some kind of structure, only to collapse again. But she was still shooting something that couldn’t fight back with her bombardment spells. Now she had to go and draw off the heat from Raising Heart, so she could fire again.

She’d just seen the Defence tumour go flying backwards through a building and into a radiation plume.The Cloud Knights seemed to be having a lot more f… a much more interesting fight.

“Hold up!” Yuuno ordered from down below. “I can see an opening.” Green chains lashed out. “Arf, if you help me, I think we can pull this section off entirely!”

“Fine,” Nanoha replied. “I’m still cooling down.”

“I see it too,” Arf agreed. Her orange chains reinforced his green. 

_‘Fate, mistress, I’m going to mark the locations for your next shots. It’s trying to regrow, but you’re damaging it more and more!’_ Vesta contributed. _‘Smash it to bits!’_

Next to her, Fate nodded, face determined. “We’re doing it,” she said to Nanoha softly.

“Yeah! We are!”

Fate took a deep breath, running her free hand through her singed hair. “You’re having problems with Raising Heart, aren’t you?” she said.

“She’s out of coolant,” Nanoha admitted. “I’m having to use a spell I stole from Chrono to make the heat go away. I sort of used most of it up in that Starlight Breaker. And then the rest of it up shooting things inside the Book. And all my secondary coolant too. And some of my emergency coolant. Almost all of it, actually.”

“Nanoha!” Fate said, scandalised. “You should have told me! That’s really dangerous! Bardiche, how much coolant do you have left?”

[Primary coolant at 31%, sir]

“Prepare to transfer half of that to Raising Heart.”

[Yes, sir!] Fate touched the gems together. [Transfer in progress.]

[Thank you, ma’am,] Raising Heart contributed. [I do not like to operate with insufficient coolant. It is outside my technical specifications. Field resupply is advised.]

“You have to treat your Device better,” Fate chided Nanoha.

“Fine! I’ll know about that next time!”

“Next time? Nanoha, you are forbidden from being eaten by a Lost Logia again!”

_‘That’s what I said!’_ Vesta agreed. _‘I found the weak spots. They’re the glowing red dots. Blow them up!’_

“Ready when you are,” Fate said.

“Divine Buster!” 

“Plasma Smasher!”

The beams punched through. At the same time the light of Arf and Yuuno’s chains intensified as they pulled. With a noise like shattering stone an entire car-sized section of Archival came away. Under the layers of brick-like books there was mounds of white paper over which black ooze crawled like strange living writing.

“Good one!” Yuuno called out. “Chrono, we’ve exposed the interior structure under the shell! Nanoha, Testarossa, focus on keeping it open!”

“Well done,” Chrono said. “Everyone, maintain a safe distance.”

“Um, yes, please do,” Hayate agreed wholeheartedly. “I’ve never cast a spell like this before!”

Fate backed away, and then had to come back to prod Nanoha meaningfully. The two of them retreated, while down below Yuuno and the familiars pulled back.

The three-pointed staff rose high, and Hayate brought it down to point at the records she’d purged from the Tome. Five white triangles appeared around her line of sight, circling the tip and spiralling inward. One by one, they overlapped and were absorbed; drawing closer and closer to the middle, until only one was left. It moved away from her, growing as it did, and further glyphs appeared around it. Not Belkan triangles; though. No, these were free-floating blocks that ran along the sides of the triangle, building outward in paragraphs like the petals of a flower with the sigil at its centre.

“Approach from beyond, mistletoe branches,” Hayate intoned. “Become spears of the silver moon, shoot and pierce! Petrifying spears, Mistilteinn!”

A ray of… something, lanced out and struck Archival. Something pale grey and sparkling with glimmering flecks. Something that moved a little _wrong_ through the air, strangely slow to the eye yet faster than it could follow. Where it struck, the dripping black surface of the book-mound turned slate grey, like fossilising wood sped up ten thousandfold. The greyness spread like a cancer, crawling across the surface until only a statue was left where the archive had been.

… except no, Nanoha realised with a strange certainty as she stared at the grey form and her HUD’s readouts. This wasn’t stone. All the light shining on the frozen mass was being reflected back as white noise.

“What was that and how did you do it?” she asked Hayate, eyes wide.

“Um. I’m not exactly sure,” the other girl said, “but Reinforce told me that it...” She frowned. “... I don’t understand the words,” she admitted. “But it’s locking it up in a magic prison.”

“My turn, then,” said Chrono. “Hope that this works. If it does, we win.”

He levelled Durandal at the stone-grey bulk of the Archival program. Deep within his Device, programs designed over the course of years with this day in mind span into action. Frost crystallised in the air around him, and a blue glow built along the long, thin barrel. Angled circles along it gave it an almost barbed look; like the shaft of a harpoon pointed down at a monstrous whale.

“Eternal Coffin,” he murmured. “Exec—”

And something slammed into the spell matrix. The uncast spell shattered, and what should have been a precise masterwork spell instead became an incoherent plume of mana. Ice layered the stone-coloured surface of the Archival system. 

But it wasn’t sealed. And the half-frozen monster made of black tar and white cloth that had ruined the spell wore Nanoha Takamachi’s face.

…

The frozen chunks of tar that had gone flying off when the Book broke its back to get at Vita had gone unnoticed and unmonitored in the chaos and confusion. Now, thawed and reactivated by a frantic defence program, they stood. Rising up from the pools and puddles they’d formed, they took shape. Human shape. Recognisable shape. Mockeries of the mages above. Mockeries of other mages. Shambling figures that resembled countless figures from all over this sector of space.

Their blank gazes found a single common point. Hayate. Their master. The greatest threat to the Book. The Defence program’s way to reintegrate itself.

“Oh no,” whispered Nanoha, raising what shields she could. There were too many of them to shoot down, and she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to anyway. There were Momokos down there. Fates. Arisas and Suzukas. She could see her own face, and countless others. But they’d got through! Chrono’s jacket was half locked up in ice, and his Device… well, it might have been damaged! Could he even cast that spell again?

At least he was alive. Nanoha was fairly sure he was swearing, because she didn’t understand the words he was using.

[Sonic Form,] Bardiche announced beside her, and she turned to look at Fate.

At the echoing thunderclap where Fate had been.

Her friend looked like a streak of actual lightning as she flew. She fell on the attackers; her Barrier Jacket stripped to almost nothing, Bardiche a scythe in her hands that was more deadly golden light than black metal. For the first time, Nanoha almost understood why people from Midchilda feared that colour; as her own Earth did radioactive green.

The mockeries fell like burning rain. Weak chunks of the Book cast off from its self-mutilation, they couldn’t defend themselves or even evade their attacker. All they were capable of was dying – explosively and in sprays of chemical fire. But none got close enough to threaten their target. Not with Fate spiralling down, cutting through head and torsos and limbs like butter, chaining speed moves from victim to victim and never for an instant slowing down enough to be seen. Nanoha’s breath was caught in her throat as she watched. She should help! She really should! But… but they looked like her friends and her mother and herself! 

Caught in a dilemma, she chose to avoid it and instead headed straight to Chrono, trying to unravel the binding spells. If he could shoot back – well, he’d probably happily shoot someone who looked just like her. Which wasn’t usually a happy thought, but was right now.

_‘Report!’_ Signum’s telepathic voice was sharp and terse.

_‘We’re being attacked by… by weaker fakes of everyone the Book absorbed,’_ Nanoha replied. _‘Lots of them. One managed to interrupt Chrono’s binding spell and—’_

_‘Were you watching the light show rather than keeping guard?’_ Signum said disapprovingly. _‘The Defence program is trying hard to get back. It knows what’s happening. We’re out of cartridges. We’ll hold it as long as we can, but you need to disable Archival.’_

That chiding hurt more than Nanoha felt was fair. No one who beat up your mother twice was allowed to make you feel guilty! _‘They came out of nowhere’_ she protested, _‘and…’_

Something howled. _‘… and what was that?’_ she finished nervously.

_‘Prepare for hard impact! Don’t let it get near Archival!’_ Shamal screamed into the same communications link.

That was the only warning they got. Something navy-white erupted from one of the service tunnels towards the stony-locked form of Archival, leaving a trail of blood behind it. It was so fast moving that Nanoha couldn’t see any details; only a mashed-up blend of man and beast whose hind legs were all but detached. They dangled behind it as it bounded towards the face of the half-sealed systems at terrible speed.

A plume of violet fire from one of the vents scorched its face, but it didn’t stop. It slammed into Yuuno and Arf’s barriers and shattered them like glass. The impact splashed the False Hound’s tarry blood all over the ground, but it didn’t care. Vesta threw herself into its way in full war form, mouth full of scarlet glowing teeth, but with another chilling howl it backhanded her out the way.

“Chain Bind!” “Lightning Bind!” “Struggle Bind!” “Chain Bind!” Nanoha couldn’t hear the full number of binding spells that were thrown out in that moment. They merged into one. Either way, the False Hound was trussed up like a Christmas present in an instant.

But its momentum kept it going forwards. No longer in control, it slammed into the form of Archival and came apart, covering the surfaces in black tar.

For a surging heartbeat, Nanoha let herself hope that the spell had held.

And then there was a cracking sound. And another crack. And another. Without Chrono’s reinforcement, the binding couldn’t hold. And as the strange grey coating broke, underneath Archival began to twist and reform. It was still locked down, but it didn’t look much like books any more.

It looked like… wolves.

Knuckles white, hands shaking, Nanoha levelled Raising Heart. She had to burn it off! Get the blood off before it could infect Archival again! Oh no, she now knew exactly what it had been doing, keeping the False Hound back just so it had a trump weapon made out of the tumour-tar of the Defence program.

[Wide Area Divine Buster,] pealed her Device.

[Plasma Barret]

“Stop!” Hayate shouted. “It won’t work! It’s already infected! And you’ll break the seal!”

_‘The Defence program is headed your way!’_ Zafira reported. _‘It’s putting everything it has into this!’_

“I know what to do,” Yuuno said, leaping up to join the girls. Magic was already gathering around his hands. 

“If you can buy me thirty seconds, I can try to—” began Chrono.

“The Garden of Time,” Yuuno said quickly. “The Book spells that can tear holes into i-space.”

“I don’t have those spells anymore!” Hayate shouted.

“No! But we do have those holes!” Nanoha said, eyes glinting. She levelled her Device, pink rings already forming. “This barrier is falling apart! And it’s nearly surrounded by the purple glow!”

“Yes,” Fate agreed, levelling her polearm. “If we shoot it with barrier breaker spells…”

“Mad. You’re all mad,” Chrono groused. Despite his words and the painful-looking frost-burns on his face, he already had Durandal levelled.

“I’m ready!” Yuuno reported. “I’ll attack the barrier directly! And we need to do it quickly!” he added, as a wave of fire denoted the desperate last stand of the Cloud Knights.

Hayate closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said. Around her, a giant white Belkan triangle sprung up. She gestured with her crozier, wings spread wide. “Resound, horn of the end! Ragnarök!”

“Thunder Smasher!”

“Divine Buster!”

“Blaze Cannon!”

“Dispel Field!”

The light was blinding. Five barrier-breaker spells struck as one, and the world shattered like so much glass. The ground beneath Archival opened up like huge jaws into a void that Nanoha well remembered. Sometimes she still had nightmares about it.

The last she saw of Archival was it beginning a fall that would never end. Then, purple-white radiance flared from every edge of the i-space rift and the barrier – the burnt, battered, brutalised barrier that they’d fought so hard in for what seemed like an age – rumbled and shook more violently than any earthquake she’d ever felt in her life. Her magic sputtered and misfired, dropping her a hundred feet before she caught herself and managed to crash-land on a fairly rubble-free patch of ground. Above, the sky boiled and bulged, becoming bright enough that it looked like noon in summertime.

And the Defence program stopped moving. The monstrous figure, burned and mutilated and pierced and broken simply stopped moving. It was eternally frozen; not by ice magic or sealing spells but through simple lack of motive power. It had cannibalised everything it had for one last dash to Archival, and now there was nothing left. No magic left for any reconfigurations. No magic left for any last tricks. No magic left at all.

Silently, imploringly the statue stood there, reaching out to the scar left by the i-space rift. There was no understanding at all in its monstrous eyes.

Picking herself up near where Nanoha had fallen, Hayate looked up at it sadly. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, clutching her crozier tight. “I’m so sorry. It wasn’t your fault. I… I wish we could have fixed you.” She let out a slow, sad sigh. 

“It’s over,” she said softly. “It’s finally… over.”

…


	14. Epilogue Three

**True Epilogue**

**1 day after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

_“… fine.” Testarossa’s expression clearly stated it wasn’t, but she didn’t push it any further. “But we need to go. Before more of the TSAB show up.”_

_“Yeah,” Nanoha sighed. “Okay. Let’s just say goodbye to my family and be off.”_

_“We need to go_ now _-” Testarossa started, but Chrono stopped her from going any further._

_“Oh,” he said smugly, wearing a smile that edged into nastiness. “I don’t think you’ll be going anywhere, actually.”_

_Nanoha stared at him, a faint trace of alarm starting to form. Beside her, her familiar let out a low growl and reverted to her kitten form; sliding into her hood. “What do you mea-”_

“Pause.”

The recording froze on her expression, her exotic UA-97er features creased in the first faint strains of worry. Yuuno gave them a glum look, then glanced away, running his hands through his shaggy blond hair. His assigned room on the _Asura_ was small and poky, and he was pretty sure that in all the panic of the last few days, the cleaning rota wasn’t happening properly. His bedsheet was certainly a lot more rumpled and creased than it had been for most of his stay here.

There wasn’t much to hold his interest in his quarters. A few Ninety-Sevener trinkets he’d picked up as presents for his family, a half-eaten meal congealing on its plate and a pair of pink hair ribbons. His gaze caught on the last for a moment before sliding back to Nanoha’s image like a magnet pointing north.

He sighed, and swiped back to the third marker on the display.

The holographic image blurred for a moment, then resolved into a swirl of violent colours…

_“Ow.”_

_Yuuno levered himself off the ground. “Ow,” he said again, more to fill the echoing silence than as a genuine expression of pain._

_Which wasn’t to say that he didn’t hurt. Because he did. Everywhere._

_“Ow. Ow. Ow.”_

Yuuno winced in remembrance as he watched. At the time, he hadn’t had a clue what had dropped him out of the sky like that, though he’d been told at his initial debriefing it had probably been an AMF pulse as the breach collapsed and the barrier had destabilised. The viewpoint on screen was dizzily swaying as its owner stumbled through the cloud of dust that had been thrown up by the last few impacts, and small wonder.

Since he was expecting it, Yuuno caught the flash of white amidst the rubble slightly before his past self, and bit his lip as the screen jolted and shuddered over to it. He leaned in unconsciously as the viewpoint knelt down towards a prone Nanoha, who groaned and rolled out from the shelter of a concrete pillar. It was tilted at a steep angle, and had a body-shaped splintered dent halfway up. Yuuno was honestly a little surprised, even now, that it had survived the impact. He bit his lip at the state of Nanoha’s onscreen Barrier Jacket; torn, charred and covered in dirt and grime.

_“Nanoha?”_ his onscreen counterpart said. _“Nanoha! Are you okay?”_

_“… uuugh,” she mumbled, “Wha’ hit me?”_

_“Something broke all our flight spells,” Yuuno told her. “You were even higher than I was! How do you feel? Can you stand?”_

_“Mm hmm.” She used him as a handle to pull herself upright, wincing as she levered herself up using her staff. She leaned heavily on him as the ground trembled again. “Are you okay? What’s happening?”_

_“I’m fine,” he said, nodding. “I think we won. The Book’s Archives are gone, and the Defence creature ran out of magic and stopped working.” He smiled faintly. “I guess Miss Yagami had the right idea, getting it out of the Book. It couldn’t survive out here, in the end. But the barrier’s had it. It’s beginning to collapse.” He pointed upwards, where the purple sky was becoming brighter and brighter; rips and rents spreading across it. “We have… I dunno. Maybe ten minutes. The TSAB should get us out before that.”_

_Nanoha mirrored his smile. “I’m glad,” she said softly. Then she hissed in pain._

_“What’s wrong?” Yuuno asked, a spike of worry straightening his spine as he helped her into a mostly clear space._

_“My hands… it’s okay, it’s not too bad.” She grinned bravely and a little sheepishly. “I guess I just went a little bit over the top with using so much mana there, heh. Oh! Raising Heart, are you okay?”_

_[Severe damage, my master. Emergency Mode 3: Really Serious Emergency Needs Fixing. Please, I advise against further use.]_

_“Okay,” Nanoha told her Device, collapsing it down to a ruby pendant as Yuuno gave it a worried look. “We won, anyway, so no more fighting needed.”_

_“Let me see those hands,” he said, and she dismissed her scorched gloves. Yuuno gasped. Her hands were reddened and blistering, already swelling up. He quickly cast a Physical Heal spell over them; numbing the pain and gently cooling the burns. He was rewarded as she relaxed; a lot of the pain and tension in her face fading away._

_“Thank you,” she said in relief._

“Pause,” Yuuno said, and zoomed the screen in on her hands. With more time to look he was pretty sure they were mostly first degree burns, but there were nastier patches here and there which would need proper treatment if she wanted to keep full use of her hands.

“Be okay, Nanoha,” he murmured. “Whatever else you are; be okay.”

He took a deep breath. This would be the hard part. He scooted back on his bunk, steeling himself.

“Play.”

_“Nanoha…” Yuuno started tentatively, and picked up certainty as he went on. “Nanoha, you need to give yourself up.”_

_She blinked at him. Her pupils were a little too small and he could tell she was in pain and trying to hide it. “What?”_

_“To the TSAB. Look, you’re right, you used too much mana in that fight. Way too much! You need a doctor! And… and your family is safe, and you just helped seal the_ Book of Darkness _, so you’re sure to get off really lightly, and you can see your family again all the time and… and it’s been_ six months _, Nanoha! I’ve missed you! Come back. Come_ home _.”_

_Nanoha looked at him solemnly. “Yuuno,” she whispered. After a moment she looked down, and Yuuno’s spirits plummeted._

_“I want to,” she admitted in a small voice. “I really want to, Yuuno. I… I want to hug mama again for weeks and weeks, and go out shopping with you, and see Alicia and Suzuka again and tell them all about what I’ve been doing. I want to sleep in my own bed again and eat proper cakes again and I really_ really _want to talk to papa about… some things I realised.”_

_“But you won’t,” he said heavily._

_“But I_ can’t _. Yuuno, the TSAB knew. Six months ago they put magic sensors all over the city; ones the Wolkenritter wouldn’t have known about! They had to have known! But they didn’t do anything!”_

_“One admiral-”_

_“Is bad, Yuuno! I believe you when you say the TSAB is mostly good, but there are people in it who do horrible things! High-up, important people! Who… who let the Book run rampant as part of some big plan, or look at an accident and try to get a weapon out of it! Or make little children fight things just to make money off them! I can’t be part of that. I don’t trust them.”_

_She reached out to take his hand before wincing and thinking better of it. “I don’t trust them. But I do trust you. I know you can make things better. Just like… just like I know I can make things better by staying with Fate and Alicia. I want to do what you do, but I just can’t. And… and I’m worried about them.”_

_She must have seen something in his expression, because she bit her lip and grimaced. “Not… not just like that, Yuuno. I mean I’m_ worried _about them. Fate… she’s been getting better at school, but she still doesn’t act or think like Suzuka or Arisa or anyone else! And Alicia… is Alicia. I think they need someone be the normal one around them. You know, like the reasonable one.”_

“Pause.”

Yuuno shut his eyes, and kept them shut for quite some time.

The voice of reason. Worried about them. Because Precia Testarossa was dying, if not already dead, and the clone of her daughter was unstable. That’s what the psychological profile the Bureau had built about her had said. He’d seen it; in fact, he’d helped the Bureau analysts build it. Without her mother, she’d be on the verge of a breakdown. And then she’d default to her sister, who was…

… well, Yuuno still remembered what the little girl had looked like next to the huge, warped monster that had been spun from the power of a Jewel Seed.

“Play,” he said hoarsely.

_“I don’t think you do reasonable. You’re the most stubborn, unreasonable girl I’ve ever known.”_ In contrast to the real Yuuno, the voice from the screen had a note of subdued humour to it. Nanoha mock-glared in response, and Yuuno almost choked on bittersweet affection.

_“You know what I mean,” she said. Leaning forward, she pressed a kiss to his cheek, lingering there for a moment and filling his senses with the smell of sweat and ozone and strawberry shampoo. “I do trust you,” she repeated softly. “To help the Bureau from the inside, and to look out for my family if I can’t. Keep in touch, okay? I know a bunch of encryption maths now. We won’t get caught.”_

_Yuuno hugged her. “I will. I’m… I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to leave me behind again.” He held up a hand as she started to protest. “But I guess I understand about not trusting the Bureau, even if I think you’re wrong. If you ever decide to come in, you know I’ll help, right?”_

_“I know.” With two quick gestures, she pulled the pink ribbons from her hair, grimacing as her fingers protested even through the numbing spell. “Here. Keep these.” She grinned, obviously on the edge of tears. “I think they’d look great on you!”_

_He chuckled weakly._

_“Yuuno-kun! You’re meant to give me your ribbons in return!” She sniffed, wiping her nose on her burnt and tattered sleeve. “Now my hair is going to get in my face!”_

_“I’ll bring you some next time we meet,” he said, his own eyes getting watery._

Winding one of the ribbons around his fingers fondly, Yuuno sat back and watched as the onscreen pair were interrupted – first by Nanoha’s frantic familiar, then by Testarossa and hers. He had thought Testarossa was going to shoot him until Nanoha had come to his defence.

_“Move, Nanoha,”_ she growled onscreen; Device pointed at him. He winced. If that wasn’t hatred in her eyes, it was a close runner-up. Testarossa had not forgiven him for sealing her sister, apparently.

_“Fate!” Nanoha stared up imploringly, spreading her hands and carefully keeping him behind her. “Yuuno is my friend! He helped us!”_

_“He shot Alicia!” Testarossa floated gently to the ground and strode forward, though Yuuno could see she was limping._

_“You shot me!”_

_Testarossa blanched and stopped dead in her tracks. Nanoha wasted no time in driving the point home._

_“When we first met, you put me in hospital! And I_ forgave _you, remember? Because you thought you were doing the right thing. Well, so did Yuuno. And he’s helped us since. So no fighting him. Even if you don’t like him, he’s a good person and my friend.”_

_“… fine.” Testarossa’s expression clearly stated it wasn’t, but she didn’t push it any further. “But we need to go. Before more of the TSAB show up.”_

_“Yeah,” Nanoha sighed. “Okay. Let’s just say goodbye to my family and be off.”_

_“We need to go_ now _-” Testarossa started, but Chrono stopped her from going any further._

_“Oh,” he said smugly, wearing a smile that edged into nastiness. “I don’t think you’ll be going anywhere, actually.”_

_Nanoha stared at him, a faint trace of alarm starting to form. Beside her, her familiar let out a low growl and reverted to her kitten form; sliding into her hood. “What do you mean?”_

“Pause.”

Yuuno stared once more at the worried look on Nanoha’s face. If only that had been it. He could deal with her being upset with him if she hadn’t... if she was...

He sighed.

“Play.”

_“I mean you’re not going anywhere,” said Chrono. “That wrench as the rift sealed shut finished what you started. The barrier disconnected. We’re floating in the Dimensional Sea now.”_

_He lowered Durandal to point at her. “You don’t have the coordinates or time to teleport away and the Asura is right outside. They should lock onto us any minute through the turbulence. It’s over, Takamachi.” His nasty smile faded into a more sincere expression. “Come in. You did well here. The Bureau will treat you fairly.” He glanced at Testarossa. “You and your friends,” he added._

_Nanoha stared at him. She followed his gaze to Testarossa whose eyes were flat and dead, then looked directly at Yuuno. Her hand rose halfway to Raising Heart, then faltered._

_“I...” she began, and Yuuno’s heart leapt._

Yuuno leaned forward, focusing intently.

_And then someone appeared between the two girls. There was no teleport beacon, no warning. Just the sudden presence of a short figure in an anonymised barrier jacket. They were tiny, whoever they were – shorter even than Nanoha or Testarossa’s sister. Nanoha’s head snapped around to the new figure, and from the look on her face whatever telepathy she heard had stunned her._

_“Cryo Bi-” Chrono snapped, but it was too late._

_The figure grabbed Nanoha by one sleeve and Testarossa by the other._

_And then they were gone._

Drumming his fingers on his knee, Yuuno pulled up another window. It contained a single message; short and to the point. The location of a heavily encrypted dead-drop folder on an out-of-the-way server. Thus far, there were no messages on it. He stared at the blank readout again, willing it to sound a new message alert.

Or... he could always...

... no. No, Nanoha had left. Left with promises to keep in touch this time, yes, but she’d still left again. It was up to her to make the first move.

He swiped back to the third marker with a sigh, giving the empty folder one last longing look.

“Play.”

...

The hospital lights hummed softly overhead.

“‘Dear Yuuno’,” Nanoha muttered, then frowned. “Urgh, no. Undo typing. Hmm. ‘Yuuno,’… no, too stiff. Undo. Um… ‘Yuuno-kun, thank you for everything’ – ah! No! That sounds like a goodbye! Undo, undo!”

She blew out an irritated sigh and shuffled further up on the pillows. She was, once again, confined to Jail’s hospital wing. And her hands were soaking in a weird funky-smelling liquid that Uno had told her was to treat mana burns, where she could flex them but nothing else. As a result, she was having to make do with a voice to text program and telepathic commands to the recorder.

Her hands were prickling again. Nanoha gritted her teeth and tried to ignore it. She was, she decided, thoroughly sick of having her hands paralysed. And Linith apparently had enough ways to do it that she couldn’t just-

Linith. The bolt of grief took the wind out of her as she remembered. Again. It kept happening. When her papa had been sick, it had hung over everything she did like a constant fog of worry, but this was _worse_. She seemed to alternate between being quietly miserable, being caught up in other things and forgetting for a while, remembering and feeling the blow all over again, and then feeling horribly guilty for having forgotten.

“‘I miss you,’” she whispered. “‘Already. I really miss you, Yuuno. Precia and Linith are... are gone. I… I didn’t even get to say goodbye. O-or thank them for… for everything.’” She sniffed. “‘W-we’re okay, we have a place to stay – I can’t tell you where,’” she added. “‘But… it hurts _so much_.’”

“Now then, dear!” Nanoha flinched and looked up, hurriedly minimising the screen with a thought. It was Jail, looking slightly sympathetic but mostly a bit manic. “You’re looking upset,” he went on. “Don’t be too sad, now. You won a great victory today, and life goes on. A great victory, yes.” His paternal smile unfolded into an overjoyed grin. “Oh, the _data_ on this Device. These observations! These readings!” 

“Mmm,” Nanoha said softly, rather lost by his glee.

His strange yellow eyes almost seemed to glow with joy. “It’s not just ‘Mmm’. Aren’t you interested? Why, I should say no better opportunity to study the Book of Darkness has been had in all its years! Live footage of its fully activated state! Recordings from _within its code-structure!_ Marvellous! Oh, and to think of the things that Uno will be able to recover from the TSAB’s investigations – but they won’t have this, aha! Come on now, give me a smile!”

Nanoha managed to muster a faint twitch of her lips for him. He gave her a shrewd look, but let it pass; either aware that her grief would take time to come to terms with or just too excited about the data he’d got from Raising Heart.

“That’s it,” he praised, a little more quietly. “And don’t worry, your Device will recover.” Nanoha’s eyes strayed to Raising Heart; the ruby gem cracked and discoloured, with patches of dark, dull red marring her bright glow. “As soon as I’ve finished processing this data and reading through Uno’s analysis, I’ll take it into the repair shop and,” he chuckled, “fix up the damage from its exertions. Though the damage you did yourself will take longer to heal.”

“Noooo! Wait wait wait!”

Both Nanoha and Jail looked up as Sein tumbled through the ceiling and dropped to the floor. In fact, Nanoha noticed, she actually dropped _through_ the floor, then bobbed back up to a normal level.

Her eyes narrowed. How much time, she wondered, did Sein spend phased out like that? Or perhaps the better question was; how much time did she spend _solid?_ And how did it _work?_ The little girl could phase through walls, ceilings… and apparently even sealed dimensional barriers. The turbulence that had kept the TSAB out for several minutes even after the barrier tore loose hadn’t even slowed her down. She’d plucked Nanoha, Fate and their familiars out and put them back on Earth as easily as Nanoha forming a training shot. And then Uno and Tre had been there with a small teleporter-equipped vessel to snatch them away.

It had seemed practiced.

She was also talking. Nanoha shook herself back to the present.

“You _can’t_ fix Raisin’ Heart, Doctor!” Sein scolded. “She’s a super-special Device and you’re not…” she hesitated briefly, “… ‘tek-o-log-ick’ friends wi’ her like ‘Licia is! She said so! So she’s gotta do it!”

Jail’s eyebrows shot up. So did Nanoha’s. “Raising Heart?” she asked tentatively.

The little gem warbled a slightly off-key chime. [I would prefer to be repaired by Miss Alicia, my master,] she chimed. [She has precedent.]

Jail looked startled and slightly put out for a moment, but recovered gracefully with a laugh. “Well, the little madam certainly has the skill for it,” he conceded. “Very well! I look forward to seeing her work! Now, Miss Takamachi, I have a few questions for you about the…”

He was prevented from asking them by a sudden hammering on the door. “Heeeey!” came a yowl from outside. “Heeeeeey! Can I come in and see mistress yet? You’ve been in there aaaaaages!”

Try as she might, Nanoha couldn’t quite stifle a giggle. Jail sighed.

“Yes, very well, come in,” he said, and the door burst open to admit a worried Vesta.

“Mistress!” she shouted at an entirely unnecessary volume, and dived across the room to latch onto Nanoha’s arm. Or tried, anyway. Jail’s hand twitched, and Vesta ran into a fence of red wires. She bounced off and landed heavily on her bottom.

“But,” Jail went on as if nothing had happened, “I will have to ask you not to disturb her hands. That burn treatment needs time to work, and any bumps or jostling will reduce its effectiveness. And we don’t want your mistress to have scarred or stiff fingers, do we?”

Vesta’s scowl diminished. Slightly. “No,” she muttered, and reverted to her kitten form to climb up onto Nanoha’s shoulder.

_‘Oh, oh!’_ she said, batting a paw at the still-minimised screen. _‘Are we writing something? What are we writing?’_

_‘A letter to Yuuno,’_ Nanoha confided. _‘A secret one. And then after that, a letter to mama and my family and friends and everyone else who was there. I hope they’re all safe, but I should tell them I am as well.’_ Her eyes went faraway for a moment as Jail asked his first question; something about how it had felt inside the Book’s superstructure.

_‘I wonder what they’re doing now?’_

…

**2 days after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

“… and Admiral Gallardo is being moved from CoreCom to assume Admiral Graham’s duties in full, including the mission to hunt down and eliminate all remaining Mariage units,” Admiral Harlaown dictated. The glow of too many screens and windows around her left her face pale and wan. “I realise this will be a difficult time for everyone. I would also like to remind everyone that all our records and communications will need to be submitted as evidence for the investigation, and any unauthorised deletion may result in court martial. No one is exempt from this, not even – especially not – me, so I expect proper compliance.”

She pinched her brow, her green hair falling in front of her eyes. Damn Gil. Damn him! His betrayal bit hard. He had been her mentor and then her friend, and she’d trusted his familiars to train her son. He had been like a father to Chrono after Clyde had died.

Reaching out, she tapped the stop icon on the projection and sat back pensively to. An old framed picture on her desk caught her attention, and she leaned over to pick it up. Lindy stared at her younger self, holding a young Chrono. Her husband stood beside her, arm around her shoulders.

“What would you say, Clyde?” she whispered to him. “We stopped it, finally. No one else will die like you did. But Gil was willing to sacrifice his homeworld to stop it. He fed people to the Book… people who trusted him. He was going to imprison a young girl forever, for the crime of having it latch onto her. If he’d… if he’d tried to bring me into his plans, would I have been strong enough to say ‘no’? Or would I have gone along for revenge? I… I miss you.”

She brushed the picture. “You’d be proud of Chrono,” she said, voice husky. “He said ‘no’. He took Gil down. All by the rules. Well, mostly. He arrested him, at least. And didn’t punch him in the face at all. I probably would have.”

There was a knock at her door. “What is it, lieutenant?” she asked the man poking his head in.

“She’s being difficult,” the young man said apologetically. “Very difficult. She’s refusing to talk to anyone but you.”

Lindy sighed. Yes. Fine. Just another headache. 

“I’ll be over in five minutes,” she said. “Give me a moment to get presentable.”

After taking a chance to freshen up and neaten her uniform, Lindy entered the interrogation room, and was immediately the target of a glare not dissimilar to a Starlight Breaker in intensity.

“We must stop meeting like this, Mrs Takamachi,” she said, settling herself down. “Have you calmed down yet?”

“Can you take these handcuffs off me?” Momoko grated out, holding up the glowing blue bands around her wrists.

“As long as you promise me you’re going to be better behaved.”

Momoko gritted her teeth together. “I am sorry for shooting that man,” she said. “But in my defence, he had a spear and he rushed towards me shouting something.”

“He was a combat medic, and he was shouting ‘Medic! Don’t shoot!’,” Lindy said wearily.

“I didn’t know that! My Device wasn’t translating things! It’s probably broken!”

“Yes, it is broken.” Lindy brought up a screen. “It is quite thoroughly broken. For one of the Asura’s surplus Devices, it’s been through a lot. Four combats with the Wolkenritter, a life-and-death fight with the Mariage, and a dimensional dislocation. With no maintenance. For six months. I’m surprised it didn’t fail on you earlier.” She deactivated the cuffs, but left the bands on. “I will reactivate them if you get threatening,” she warned.

“It was a misunderstanding,” Momoko said sulkily. “Everything was very tense!”

“Tense. Yes, that’s one way of describing things,” Lindy said diplomatically. “Now…”

“How’s Kyouya?” Momoko demanded, hands held carefully still on the table.

“That’s what I was about to say. Your son is getting the medical treatment he needs, and your daughter and husband are with him. Because they didn’t attack any of my people. Yes, I realise you know it was an accident,” Lindy said, raising a hand to forestall any outburst, “but that’s the only reason you’re not there with them. If you hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have teleported you up into isolation.” She took a breath. “And I’m here in person. Now, can we talk?”

“Fine,” Momoko replied, as if it was a great concession. “But I’m not turning on my daughter. You can’t use me against her. Nanoha has been trying to help people. She _has_ been helping people. I don’t believe she’s done anything wrong, and I’m proud of her and her actions.”

Lindy felt a headache coming on as she stared at the woman. “Mrs Takamachi, your daughter is using a Class 1 Lost Logia in her Device. An unstable, highly destructive artefact that neither she nor we fully understand, which you’ll recall was the cause of quite a hassle six months ago. And she’s using it as a power source, and...” she closed her eyes in pain, “hitting people with it.”

“Well,” Momoko said in an almost aggressively reasonable tone, “Alicia seemed like a bright young girl when I met her. Perhaps she worked out how to use them safely.”

“A six year old?”

“Her mother may also have helped,” Momoko amended.

Lindy gritted her teeth and clenched a fist under the desk. “The Bureau...” she started, and cut off. Getting into an argument about whether the Jewel Seeds were safe would get them nowhere, and she knew Momoko was baiting her. “... has asked Nanoha multiple times to cooperate with us, and yet she has a nasty habit of fighting us instead. You can see how this looks bad, given her association with a dimensional criminal.”

“As far as I saw, Nanoha is quite happy to cooperate with you. She was working with that nice Yuuno boy without any trouble,” Momoko shot back blithely. Lindy quietly suppressed the urge to strangle her, and forced a smile.

“If that were the case, I’m sure she wouldn’t have any issues staying around afterwards, now would she?” she said with false cheer. “But instead, she keeps disappearing – along with people who, I’m afraid to say, match the methods and signature of several recent kidnappings.” She leaned forward, dropping the smile. “Mrs Takamachi, we mean no harm to your daughter, but she is in over her head and I’m worried that she’s being badly influenced.”

Momoko pursed her lips, her own friendliness disappearing. “I trust my daughter, Admiral Harlaown,” she said flatly. “Your assessments of situations involving her haven’t always been perfect.” She crossed her arms. “I think you’re willing to say anything because you’re worried about the magical thing she has.”

“... so that’s it, then,” Lindy said. She looked the native woman up and down. Determination was in every line of her body – determination not to apologise, or capitulate, or cooperate against her daughter. “You’re going to throw all your trust behind your daughter’s judgement, and hope for the best.”

“If I need to. I wish she was back home. Of course I do! She’s nine! The only thing worse than having to pretend to people that she’s missing and we’re desperately looking for her is when she’s actually in danger and I can’t do a thing to help!” The cracks in Momoko’s façade were more than enough to show just how much the woman was running on anger, using it to suppress her fears. “But I don’t see any reason to help your space government! Every time you’ve shown up, you’ve hurt people I care about!” She glowered. “And I’ve spent days in this cell!” she added.

Lindy exhaled, and rubbed her brow tattoo. “I do understand you’re scared and angry,” she said, trying to remain calm. She had to be the bigger woman, which meant not pointing out that Momoko had been the one refusing to talk to anyone and yelling at her crew. Even if she really wanted to. “But please, I don’t like this any more than you do. Precia Testarossa is a dangerous criminal, and the fact that your daughter is involved with her is a tragedy. Yes, I believe Nanoha means the best, but as you said, she’s nine. But I’m not going to persuade you here. 

“So instead I’ll tell you what we’re going to do now. I’m going to release you from here as long as you promise to be on your best behaviour. Then you’re going to the medbay for precautionary treatment.” Momoko winced at that. “Yes, I see you remember how nasty the drugs taste,” Lindy said, with genuine sympathy. “And you can see your son first while they work their way through your system. After that and once you’re feeling better – and maybe once we’ve both had some sleep – we can try talking again.”

Momoko sighed, running her hands through her brown hair. The bags under her eyes showed how tired she was. “Fine,” she agreed. Her eyes gleamed. “I don’t suppose you’d care to give me a new Device? Just to avoid any translation issues?”

“I think that may have to wait,” Lindy said tactfully. “For the sake of the doctors, if no one else.”

Having sent the troublesome Mrs Takamachi on her way under armed guard, Lindy returned to her office and reheated her cold tea. Frowning up, she retrieved the recording from the unfortunate medic who had the misfortune of encountering an angry Momoko. Something still wasn’t holding together. She vaguely recalled reading that the woman’s Device was entirely non-functional when it was recovered – but then how had she taken down a Jacketed soldier, even one who hadn’t been expecting it?

It was probably best that she didn’t have a mouthful of tea when she found the incident in question. Everyone was on edge and looking for Mariage, so perhaps it was only natural that the medic had his standard Belkan-style spear extended and ready. She watched as the unfortunate medic turned a corner, only to run into a crude crimson Mid-style casting circle. 

“Friendly! Don’t shoot! We’re on your si—” began the man. 

“Sunlight Shooter!”

And then something that was either a poorly contained bombardment spell or an overscaled shooting spell slammed into the medic and detonated.

Lindy paused the recording, feeling numb. Yes, the man hadn’t protected himself properly and yes, that wasn’t a particularly well-cast spell. But it had been cast without a Device. Rewinding, she examined the casting-circle again. Momoko seemed to be using some kind of condensation spell to maintain a prepared effect, fuelling its natural loss with ambient mana. That certainly wasn’t standard practice. No wonder it had been poorly contained and unstable – the woman had been casting without assistance.

That she was doing it with only _six months informal self-taught training_...

... except no, it wasn’t even that. Mind racing, Lindy took a long sip of tea. Momoko Takamachi, from the reports her ground troops had given her, had not been able to do that a few weeks ago. This change was recent, and reminded her of the explosive growth that Yuuno Scrya had spoken of about the woman’s daughter. An uncanny knack for mimicking spells she’d seen used, he’d said. And a stubborn disregard for the accepted rules of magical theory that led to her forcing clumsy, inelegant and often dangerous solutions to work on pure power and little else.

She groaned. Momoko Takamachi was clearly going to practice magic with or without a Device, so they basically had to give her one for safety’s sake so she didn’t kill herself. And maybe ones for the girls who were part of her little cabal too.

And yes, perhaps they’d put a few tracker programs on them, too, she added privately. A range of them at different levels of obviousness, just in case the native mages were clever enough to expect such a thing and go looking. After two incidents on this planet in half a year, it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on what the local mages were doing.

...

**6 days after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

“Knock knock.”

Reclining on a comfortable seat in the medical wing lounge, Zest grunted with ill humour and cracked an eye open. His mood shifted as he saw who it was.

“Megane,” he rumbled. “Good to see you.”

“I wish I could say the same, Zest, I really do.” Megane swept in her full Barrier Jacket, purple hair pinned up into a bun. She gently set down the carry-cot she carried without waking the thankfully-sleeping baby it held. Little Lutecia was wrapped around her slightly battered puppy-kitten toy, nuzzling into its neck and murmuring softly.

“You look awful,” she added meaningfully, with a nod at his chest. He grunted again, keeping his voice as soft as possible to avoid stressing his healing ribcage. “And Quint is hardly any better. Honestly, I leave the team for six months and you both put yourself in hospital.”

He risked stretching a hand out to lay it on top of hers. The snide comments revealed how worried she was. Megane was rarely unkind to people she actually liked. “I’m glad to see you missed us,” he said.

“Yes. Unfortunately, your respective assailants did _not_ miss you,” she said acidly.

“Megane,” he said again. “I’m going to be fine. You’ve already talked to the doctors, you know that. And it was worth it to put the Book down for good.”

“Hm.” It was a short, sceptical sound. “I’ll believe that when I see it. The master might want us to think everything’s under control, but I don’t trust that thing.”

He waved her scepticism off. “It’s down for now, at least. While the Mariage are active, they’re the bigger threat.”

That earned him a glare. “Yes. That’s the only reason I’ve been dragged off maternity leave. And if it wasn’t Mariage I wouldn’t be here and would be home with my daughter and…” she sighed. “I’m sorry,” she apologised. “I’m not happy about this. I know I’m one of the few people who can extract data from their cores, and I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”

“No, that’s fair,” he said. “I was angry when I got called up when my second was born.” Looking around again – and finding nobody nearby – Zest lowered his voice anyway. “And did you manage to get those checks done?” he asked, propping himself further upright on his elbows.

Megane gently pushed him back down with a finger before pulling out a disposable data-device. “Here,” she said. “I pulled some favours for this to get it done off the books, so take care with it. Full analysis and the data is on there, but in summary – you were right. That was a good hunch. The mitochondrial DNA is nearly identical. Nanoha Takamachi, Momoko Takamachi and Hayate Yagami are from the same matriline. And from the lack of mutations, the link is relatively recent - only a few generations back. If they inherited family names properly on UA97, this would have been obvious from the beginning.”

“Mmm.” Zest smiled, not entirely pleasantly. “I thought it had to be something like this. Three women, from a limited geographic region of an uncontacted isolated world? All with freakishly strong linker cores? It didn’t seem like a coincidence to me.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anyone pick up magic as quickly as Nanoha Takamachi. She reverse-engineers and compiles spells in combat time. Her mother seems to have some of the same talent, given she’s entirely self-taught. And Hayate Yagami performed on-the-fly modifications to the Book of Darkness minutes after gaining full administrative control.” He shook his head. “So, where’s their root? I suppose we’re in the right region of space for someone with Hegemony genes, like... what’shername, from that support squad?”

Megane spread her hands. “They’re ancestral human,” she said. 

“What.”

“I know, I know, it sounds stupid. But my contact knew straight off they were from an isolate population. I didn’t even tell them. Trace degraded Alhazredian genemarkers, nothing Belkan, nothing Galean, nothing Ossirian... nothing at all. It’s possible there’s some modifications that aren’t in the standard libraries that the tests didn’t notice, but genetically? They’re nearly the sort of thing you might find in _fossils_ on Type-1A worlds.”

“But... that doesn’t make any sense,” Zest said, frowning. “I was so sure that...”

“It was a nice idea, boss,” Megane drawled, “but had the critical flaw that it wasn’t true. Just like I was so sure that Takamachi had to be part of a berserker line - and the fact that her self-taught, half-trained mother tried to fight the Wolkenritter three times seemed to support it. But no, apparently ancestral humans just had low survival instincts.”

“There has to be something going on,” the man growled. “Baseline humans can’t decompile mana condensation spells _on the fly_ and then attach them into their spells! Not even if they have an Eidolon-class Device! _I_ can’t do it, and Nanoha Takamachi is _nine years old_.”

“Jealousy ill-suits you,” Megane said unhelpfully. Despite her flippancy, though, her brow was furrowed.

“I wonder what we’d get if we looked at Admiral Graham’s genetics,” Zest tried. “He’s also from here. And he’s unusually strong, _and_ he was enough of a madman to hack and manipulate the Familiar Spell. Maybe there’s some greater...”

“You’re reaching,” Megane said sharply. A hiccup from the cot froze them both for a moment as they waited to see if they’d woken the baby, but apart from turning over she stayed peaceful. Megane sighed in relief and continued in softer tones. “Yes, there’s something strange going on with the Takamachis and Hayate Yagami, but we know they’re close maternal relatives. We’re probably dealing with an unusual mutation in an isolated population that crops up once and passes down the female line. Dragging Admiral Graham into things just ruins your hypothesis. Isn’t he from the other side of the planet? Isn’t it more likely that he’s a driven, fanatical man who needed loyal servants and had been studying the Familiar spell for decades to manage to manipulate it in small ways?”

Zest sighed. “I suppose you’re right,” he said reluctantly.

“Not everything is a conspiracy. Not everything is connected.” Megane smiled wryly. “Although you know what I’m glad of? Nanoha and Momoko Takamachi were also valid hosts for the Book of Darkness. It must have at least considered them. The best thing it did was pick Miss Yagami instead.”

Slumping down, Zest raised a hand halfway to his face before wincing and lowering it again. “Yes,” he agreed. “I’ve been thinking what would have happened if we’d run across Nanoha Takamachi with the Book of Darkness during the Jewel Seed incident. That would have been bad. Even more than a big strong man like me could have handled.”

Megane chuckled, and checked her Device. “I need to report for check-in for my ride in ten minutes. Just remember, I’ve written down everything that you need to know and-”

“I’ll be fine, Meg. I know how to handle babies. My ex would at least give me that much.” He looked down at the sleeping Lutecia, who was chewing on the ear of the red-eyed white toy tucked into her carry cot. “She’s safe with Uncle Zest.”

“Just remember, I will maim you if she gets hurt.”

“You’re supposed to smile when telling a joke.”

“I wasn’t joking.”

...

**7 days after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

Signum’s fingers twitched. She stared across the arena of conflict, her gaze meeting the single red eye of her opponent. The Master Program of the Book of Darkness stared back, neither empathy nor sympathy in her dead stare. The light overhead was stark white, and cast no shadows. She knew the onlookers were watching for any sign of weakness or lack of resolve.

And there! A weakness! Like a snake, the Blade of the Book of Darkness struck!

With a click, she placed her red tile on the board.

Three of the five players had already been eliminated. Vita had been the first to go. She never had a chance, starting between Shamal and Zafira. But Shamal had been over-ambitious with her tile placement, and that had left a vulnerability that Signum had mercilessly exploited - and when the Healer had turned her attention to the Blade, Reinforce had fallen on her weakened flank and captured most of her territory. Zafira had fallen behind after the early game despite a powerful early position after an impromptu alliance between Signum and Reinforce had barely checked him, and now he was out.

And so any hint of alliance between the two women was dead.

There could only be one victor in this game of Kampfhunde!

“Your move,” she told Reinforce.

The other woman shifted. She still seemed uncomfortable with the permanent damage she had suffered in the fight. A white bandage covered her empty left socket, and the empty left arm of her simple white dress was discretely pinned back. The damage to the Book - not to mention the determination of the Cloud Knights themselves to demonstrate they were no longer a threat - meant that they had not tried to regenerate the damage she had suffered. Reinforce herself had expressed fear that any regrowth might go wrong. The idea that she might be corrupted afresh caused her visible pain.

Of course, none of them were too comfortable in their presence circumstances. The Wolkenritter - and even they were not sure if Reinforce should now be counted as one of them - had been confined to a specialist containment cell that had been transferred onboard. The AMF that saturated the entire space was a constant weight. None of them had their Device, and that made the knights antsy.

“Bored. Bored bored bored,” moaned Vita, lying on her back as she tossed a rubber ball at the wall repeatedly. “Urgh! You know what’s really annoying me?”

No one said anything.

“I said, you know what’s really annoying me?” Vita repeated more loudly.

“What is annoying you?” Shamal asked serenely. Eyes closed, she was kneeling in meditation.

“I didn’t even get that rematch with Tacha… Takimark… that brat who broke my jaw!”

“Wasn’t it that trapped tree that broke your jaw?” Zafira drawled from where he was sprawled out over one of the chairs.

That got him a dirty look. “No,” Vita grumped. “She punched me.”

“Oh yes. So she did. And she was a shooting mage. How sloppy of you.” He caught the ball when Vita hurled it at his head. “I thought you’d have had more of a grudge against whoever threw the tree.”

“She broke my jaw! And I didn’t get to fight her again!” Vita sat up, lips in a pout. “Give me back my ball!”

“No.” Zafira tossed it up and caught it. “Though that does remind me. Shamal, didn’t you say you’d detected the tree thrower during the fight over that strange little girl with the Jewel Seed in her?”

Shamal nodded, eyes still closed. “I didn’t get proper contact,” she said, “but I felt their presence. There was no sign of them later, though.”

Zafira grinned in a way which could only be described as wolfish. “See, Vita,” he said. “You might still get a chance against them.”

“Good! I owe them for nearly breaking my neck!” She huffed, tossing her pigtails back. “It’s not fair! Signum got a great fight with Taka-thingie’s blonde friend! What did I get?”

“What’shername on the rollerskates?”

“Pah! Hardly a match for how things were in the old days! I remember proper war-skaters, not policewomen pretending to be knights.”

“I was nearly torn apart by Mariage,” Signum called out, eyes narrowed. “That took any enjoyment out of it for me.”

“But before that?”

Signum smiled quietly. “Yes. It was a good fight.” She toyed with one of the pieces. “I would like to fight her again when she is fully grown. Children rely too much on magically compensating for their inferior strength and reach to achieve perfect bladework.”

“It’s so unfair!”

Reinforce frowned. “I enjoyed neither the fight with the artificial mage nor the assault of the Mariage,” she said softly. “The fragment of my consciousness within the extension of the Book was greatly concerned.” She sighed. “And I felt guilt for how your ignorance forced you to go against your oaths in the futile hope that your actions would save our master.”

An awkward silence fell on the room.

“We go to face judgement, for our broken oaths and for our misguided deeds,” Shamal said, her face as still as a mountain pool. “I will accept it. I could not save her despite all my healing magics and all my knowledge. She saved us. If the Bureau wishes to execute us for our many, many crimes then we shall at least die with honour and keep her safe by doing so. Our crimes should not weigh her down.”

Zafira smiled grimly. “If it helps,” he said, voice dry, “I think the Bureau’s laws on prescription mean they cannot bring charges for most of the incidents we were involved in. For one, they occurred before the TSAB was founded.”

“You’re being more useless than usual,” Vita said tartly, glaring at him. “They’re hardly going to go after Signum for killing a Sankt Kaiser… like, two hundred years ago.”

“The Saint-Church might have tried. They’re officially the successor-state, and so they-”

“Stop showing off,” Vita ordered, hands on her hips. “No one is impressed.”

“Whatever our fate, we await it with calm resolve,” Signum said. “We failed our master, and disobeyed her too. We will not bring further shame on her, nor will we cast aside our honour. If the TSAB decides we must be destroyed for fear that we may still be corrupted by the Defence Program, then our deaths may save her.” She returned her gaze to Reinforce. “And you?” she asked softly. “You who understood the corruption of the Book when we did not?”

Reinforce’s eyes widened fractionally. “Why would you doubt me?” she asked softly. “I am a knight of the Book, just as you are. My shame is greater than yours. Death may be too kind, though I would hate to make our lady upset. But I will keep her safe, even from myself.” Her lips curled up in a fractional smile, “Even if I am now not as well-armed as you are.”

Signum nodded. Vita just groaned. “That was terrible,” she said accusingly.

“I quite liked it,” Zafira observed.

“You would,” she grumbled. Jabbing a finger at Reinforce, she squared her shoulders. “You! You are forbidden from being another Zafira, do you hear me? I’ve had it up to here with his teasing and his stupid jokes and I don’t need to get any more of it.”

“And when she’s had it up to here, that’s at least up to waist height for the rest of us,” Zafira said in a stage-whisper. 

“Are you just getting revenge for the last time you were a tiny little wolf-girl?” Vita asked, pouting.

Zafira considered the question. “Yes,” he said firmly. “Yes, I am. I’d like everyone to note how I haven’t once picked her up by her ankles, like she used to do to me.”

“... yes you did! Last month you did exactly that to make Hayate laugh!”

“He was only entertaining our lady,” Shamal said, eyes still closed.

“And now you’re on his side!”

“I’m on the side of whoever ends this silly argument,” Shamal said firmly. “We may be heading to our deaths. We throw ourselves on the mercy of men who call us monsters - and may be right to do so. Calm dignity befits us, for it is all we have left.”

Zafira sighed. “I can’t face Shamal when she’s being depressing like that,” he observed. “Where’s the kettle? I’m going to make some tea. I suppose everyone will want it the same way they always do…” he paused, and looked at Reinforce. “What do you want?”

Reinforce tilted her head, white hair falling in front of her eye. She huffed it out the way. “I will have it as I had it when the captain interrogated me,” she said seriously. “With milk and six spoons of sugar.”

...

**12 days after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

Deep within the angular structure of a Bureau orbital station, tension hung heavy in the air.

“So?” Hayate asked hopefully. “What do you think?”

“Mmf!” Quint Nakajima replied, which wasn’t really that useful as criticism. “S’good! Any more?”

The small shared kitchen was slightly grimy and the drying rack was covered in mugs. The coffee machine had an ‘Out of Operation’ label on it. Still, Hayate had managed to make things work, even though moving her wheelchair around the space hadn’t been the easiest. She was a bit jealous that Quint could just hover rather than have to use crutches while her legs healed. She offered the woman the rest of the tray of pastries, and watched with mild surprise as she devoured them. All of them. Even one-armed, the tray was clear in less time than it usually took her four Knights to finish theirs.

… though, Hayate admitted in the privacy of her own head, that might also be because Quint wasn’t wasting time trying to steal her neighbour’s food, or defending her food against someone else trying to filch a mouthful here or there. She’d offered to make more the first few times, but had eventually come to realise that they just liked the challenge of competing.

Honestly. Belkans.

“Really though,” Quint went on between mouthfuls of the last muffin, “these are really good. You’re a fantastic cook, Hayate. I’m not surprised you won them over with food like this.”

Hayate giggled. “Thank you. So what are we doing today?” She scrunched her nose up and poked at her legs. “More physio?” It had been _amazing_ getting to walk and move around again when Unisoned with Reinforce, but she wasn’t sure it was worth the evil torture that was physical therapy to relearn how to stand on her own again. Maybe she could just stay Unisoned with Reinforce all day instead?

Quint made a face. “In the afternoon, yeah. Sorry. At least you can suffer alongside me though, eh? Imagine how it would be on your… uh, anyway, that leads into something I’ve been meaning to ask you.” She looked, Hayate thought, uncharacteristically nervous for the nice, funny lady she’d turned out to be over the two weeks she’d spent in various TSAB medical wings. Hayate had made Vita say sorry, but she still felt bad about how much her knight had hurt the woman.

“… go ahead,” she said warily.

Quint was silent for a moment; her eyes straying and the fingers of her good hand tapping restlessly against her knee. “I want you to understand; you don’t have to answer now. Or at all, if you feel awkward about it. In fact, I’d like you _not_ to answer right now; this is something you should think hard about before making a decision.”

Well that sounded ominous.

Clearing her throat, Quint got to the point. “It’s just… it’s looking like the aftereffects of that fight and the strain of that first Unison are going to have you needing medical oversight for a while,” she explained. “And there’s only so long we can make excuses for you on Earth, and having a TSAB medic visit you for checkups after you get better would either mean a long trip for them, or someone permanently stationed there, or a local doctor – and all of them mean you wouldn’t be getting the absolute best quality care that you could find here in the Core worlds. And you’re a sweet kid, and I’ve gotten to really like you in the time we’ve spent together…”

Or maybe she was just going around the point in circles. Hayate cocked her head and gave Quint a quizzical and slightly worried frown.

“… and if you wanted, you could come and live with me,” Quint finished in a rush. “With… me and my husband, I mean. We could adopt you. You said you don’t really have any family on Unad… on Earth, and you need someone to take care of you, and we seem to get along well…” She paused for breath. “Think about it,” she repeated. “I’m not looking for an answer now, and I don’t want to… to pressure you to say yes, or give you the wrong idea about why I’m asking. I really do think you’re a great kid, and I’d love to give you a home. I’ve asked my husband, Genya, and he’s all for it. So… yeah. Keep that in mind.”

Hayate blinked a few times. Then a few times more. She felt confused, and a little bit stunned. Like there were clouds in her head, fogging everything up.

“… my Knights…” she started hesitantly. “If… if they need somewhere to live too…”

“Genya was a bit worried about that,” Quint nodded, looking calm and nervous and strangely vulnerable for someone who’d gone toe-to-toe with an angry Vita and managed a draw. “But I’ve talked to them, and he’s willing to trust my judgement. They could come too.”

Hayate wasn’t sure what to think for a moment. She couldn’t put a name to the warm glowing feeling growing in her chest. But it was growing. Fast.

“… I don’t think I need to think about it,” she said slowly. “My answer probably isn’t going to change.”

Quint looked a little crestfallen, but nodded. “Well… wait a day or so anyway,” she said. “And if you don’t bring it up again, that’s fine.”

Hayate bit her lip. She _should_ probably think about it some more. And talk to her Knights, just to make sure. And work out how to keep in touch with Chikaze if she went to live in space. Wow, living in space. It sounded so cool when she put it like that. But she really, really wanted to yell ‘yes, of course I want to live with you!’ as loud as she could. Especially since it looked like Quint was being silly and thinking Hayate was going to say ‘no’.

With an effort of will, she restrained herself to a nod instead. “I’ll definitely give you an answer tomorrow, then,” she said firmly, sizing Quint up with new eyes. “And more baking. You need to eat more if you’re going to get your arm and knees all better.”

Quint smiled a little. “I’ll look forward to that, then,” she said. “But for now, there’s someone else who wanted to talk to you. And this is another thing where you don’t have to if you don’t want to; there’s no pressure at all here to go along and speak to him.”

Hayate tilted her head. If this was a surprise like the last one, there was no way she wasn’t going! “Who is it?”

Quint took a deep breath. “Gil Graham. The man… the admiral who was trying to seal the Book away.”

Oh.

Hayate thought for a minute. And then another minute. And then several minutes more. She’d been told the basics of his plan when she was debriefed. How he’d kept the TSAB from finding out that her Knights had awoken. Had sent his familiars to quietly help them fill the Book. Had planned to freeze her when it activated, and lock her away in some super-secret heavily-guarded Bureau prison. Frozen and hidden away forever.

She shivered. But her chin rose stubbornly.

“I’ll talk to him,” she said.

...

Gil Graham was in a prison cell. In deference to the fact that he’d surrendered mostly of his own accord and was providing the investigators with evidence they’d have spent months or years tracking down otherwise, it was a _nice_ prison cell. It reminded Hayate of a smallish hotel room, actually; decorated in plain creams and browns and with plain but functional furniture, including a cat bed that his familiars were curled together on top of.

The only un-hotel-like parts were the pale blue forcefields over the heavy door and at several intervals down the corridor outside it that stopped him from leaving. Hayate had to stop and wait for a minute after each one before the next would open – a security measure, Quint said, which could only be overridden in emergencies.

He stood up from the little desk as she wheeled herself in, bore Quint’s menacing stare with impressive composure, and sat down again once Quint stepped out. Hayate shifted so she could still see the woman’s reassuring presence just outside the door in the corner of her eye, and studied him carefully.

… he didn’t really _look_ like an evil mastermind, she was forced to admit. He was a westerner, also from Earth, and he looked a bit like an actor or maybe a politician. Though maybe that was partly the old man clothes he had his Jacket set to. If he was wearing… like, a cape or something, and holding one of those thin whippy swords that Signum said were for duelling, he’d probably look lots more sinister. And then he’d say something like…

“Good morning, Miss Yagami. Hayate? However you would like to be addressed. I’m very glad you decided to come, and I hope you’ll let me apologise for my actions.”

… no, not like that at all.

She blinked at him owlishly as he bowed his head. “In trying to rid the world of a monster, I was going to sacrifice – to murder – an innocent. That I grieved the necessity did not stop me believing it right, in my arrogance. And when my scheme failed, it was you and those like you who managed to do what I could not, and redeem the Book of Darkness without further loss of life.”

He looked up and met her eye. “What I did was wrong, and I will not make excuses or justifications to defend it. I am, truly, sorry. And I am more glad than I can say that you are alive, and on the way to health and happiness.”

Hayate considered this carefully.

“Would you do it again?” she asked. “If you could. If you were back in the same position, and not in jail.”

This seemed to throw Graham a little. He started to say something, stopped, frowned and fell silent. Hayate mentally chalked him up a point as he thought hard for a moment. He was taking her seriously.

“… if I found myself back at the time when Clyde sent me the coordinates the Book was searching for a new master…” he said slowly, “then knowing what I know now… hmm.” He looked down. “The Mariage… I did not see coming. I think nobody could have predicted them – and though the Book no doubt slaughtered most of them, it will be years before we can say with any certainty that they are no longer present in this sector. The drain of the Book would still, in its damaged state… it would still be affecting your health. And so I would still see it as a unique opportunity to end the threat of the Book forever, and I remain doubtful that the Bureau would go along with such a plan.”

He sighed.

“I cannot say I wouldn’t be tempted,” he admitted, and Hayate shrank back into her wheelchair. “But I think – I hope – that I would come clean to you. As soon as I found you. Before the Book activated, before the Knights initialised. And give you a choice.”

Hayate looked at him for what felt like a long time, sorting through how she felt about that. Eventually, she gave a cheerful shrug.

“Okay then,” she said lightly.

The look on his face was funny enough that she almost giggled. “I… beg your pardon?” he stammered, thrown for a moment. Hayate nodded firmly.

“And I give you it. You’re pardoned. It’s okay. Oh, and you can call me Hayate.”

Graham seemed unsure of how to take that, and even glanced uncertainly at the door. Hayate sighed.

“Look. You were trying to do the right thing. You just did it really badly and in a dumb way. Like my Knights were, trying to fill the Book without me knowing.” She paused. “Or trying to take all the blame for doing it and go to jail for ages and ages so that I don’t get punished. Which they think I don’t know about.”

Sadly, this didn’t get another funny reaction out of him. Graham seemed to have got his expression under control again, and just gave her a long, evaluating look. “If they think you don’t know that, how did you find out?” he asked. “Did someone on the case tell you?”

“No,” Hayate said blithely. “They’re just really predictable about protecting me and being all honourable and… Belkan. It’s a bit silly, and this time I’m not letting them get away with it. I’m the master of the Tome, so I’m the one who’s meant to protect them. So that’s what I’m going to do.” She frowned as a thought struck her. “Oh. I should tell Miss Quint that, in case she… mm.”

Graham studied her for a little longer. There was something lurking in his expression; something sharp and sad and tinged with respect. “You’re sure about this?” he asked. “It will mean the punishment will fall on you, if you do this.”

Hayate gave a single, sharp nod. “I’m sure. The Tome is mine. I claimed it, so it’s my responsibility. And they _were_ technically following my orders when they went out to attack people.” Admittedly, the orders in question had been ‘I don’t want you to kill anyone or conquer anywhere’, but they’d still been following them.

The look _that_ earned her said in very big letters that he knew she was bending the truth. But he nodded, and even chuckled softly. “Well, in that case,” he said more warmly. “What are your plans regarding the damage to the Book?”

Hayate scowled. “The _Tome_ ,” she insisted. “It’s not the Book of Darkness anymore.”

“Mmm. I was afraid of that.” Graham lost his smile and leaned forward; his mood turning serious. “What do you know about the inner structure of the Book, Miss... Hayate?” He held up a hand quickly. “The Book as it was before that last fight, not the Tome as it is now.”

Hayate settled down a little and thought about it. “Um… quite a lot?” she said. “But it’s all sort of… jumbled. I’m not sure there was enough space in my head for everything that it put in. I know there were seven different big sections in it. The Core, where I was. Defence and Archival, which were all corrupted and evil. Analytical, the watchy-thinky bit. Absorption, the bit that got Nanoha. My Knights, obviously. And Restoral, which I used to fix them.”

Graham nodded. “That last one is what I’m worried about. The Book has shown itself able to repair damage in the past. In the event of severe damage sustained on one of its rampages that’s limited – I doubt the Absorption structure Miss Takamachi destroyed will be coming back. But Restoral may well try to repair the corrupted sections. And while the backups would have been in Archival, which was lost, I’m concerned that any secondary backups might have been made…”

“After the damage that made it go evil,” Hayate whispered, paling. Graham nodded sadly.

“Exactly.” He sighed. “It is a pity that Archival was lost. If we had that; if we could pick through it slowly and safely, we might be able to find the original settings of the Tome from before its corruption buried in its memories. As it is… I’m afraid that the corrupted segments may, in time, regenerate and start the cycle over again.”

Hayate felt her head shaking numbly. “No,” she said. “No, that can’t… we can’t let that happen. How do we stop it?”

Graham pursed his lips and leaned back, accepting one of the cat-familiars as she leaped onto his lap. Hayate felt a dull pressure kneading her thighs – it was still strange to feel things below her waist – and looked down to find the other one looking up at her.

“I’ve mentioned this fear to Bureau staff,” Graham said quietly. “Their most reliable suggestion was a complete formatting of the Tome. Wipe every sector down to the bare bones. Your Knights would be fine as long as they weren't absorbed into the Tome at the time, though it would wipe their backed-up memories clean. No more incarnations – the next master’s Knights would be brand new people. And I suspect the master program would be lost.”

Hayate bit her lip nervously, but the cat on her lap butted against her hand as she shrank in on herself. _‘Don’t worry,’_ she said, in English-accented Japanese. _‘Gil came up with another way!’_

She looked up hopefully, and Graham smiled. “I _did_ spend almost a decade scanning the Book,” he said. “And you have complete access at the highest levels. I think – I can’t promise anything, but I think – that if we work together, we might be able to cauterise the missing sections. We can’t rebuild them the way they were without the archives… but we may be able to cordon them off and prevent Restoral from trying to rebuild them at all. Archival will be the difficult one – the Tome needs that. But that should also be the easiest to rebuild manually, without resorting to corrupted secondary backups. And if we then seal Defence and Absorption away, it will be safe. Crippled, but safe.”

Shakily, Hayate took what felt like the first breath since he’d mentioned the problem. She didn’t bother trying to choose between the two. One option was acceptable and the other wasn’t; it was as simple as that. “And…” she said, “I guess... the TSAB would be less... scared of the Tome. If it were missing two bits like that. Right?”

He nodded, and didn’t hide the look of pride.

“And you promise you’ll help?”

Graham – or maybe Gil, she decided. Gil looked at her for a moment longer, absently petting the purring cat in his lap.

“Hayate,” he said eventually. “Looking at you, and your plans, and the person you’ll one day become... even if I didn’t owe you a debt, helping you is the very least I could do. And if you’re determined to go forward with this plan for the hearing...” He mulled it over, and shrugged in an echo of her own gesture.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to help with that as well.”

...

**14 days after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

Under the bridge, the river roamed and rushed down its carefully cut channel. Two of the moons of Mid hung in the summer sky overhead. With a sigh, Mei tossed a pebble down and watched the splash.

Chrono coughed.

“What?”

He pointed at the ‘Do Not Throw Objects In The River’ sign that she was leaning on.

“Oh, come on. That’s total rubbish. Rivers are made for throwing stuff in.” She twisted. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

Chrono leant on the bridge, brows furrowed. He was wearing full Enforcer dress uniform, and for once wasn’t in his field Barrier Jacket. “The hearing’s out for lunch. I get an hour of daylight, and then it’s going to be back inside being asked very pointed questions by people who don’t want to believe that an admiral went rogue.”

“Ouch.”

“That’s one way of saying it.” Chrono looked up at the circling toothed-birds. “What about you?”

Mei grinned. “Don’t make it too obvious and don’t look like you’re staring,” she said softly, “but if you look down there, over by those trees?”

“Your sister and... Lanster?”

“Yep,” Mei said, smirk widening. “They’re just having a little picnic. She finally got her act together and asked him out, since she’s headed back to med school once these hearings are over. I’m here to protect her virtue. Or, you know, make jokes if she decides to deactivate her barrier jacket and show off the nice undies I got her for her last birthday. Her choice, really.”

Chrono directed a flat stare at her. 

She nudged him in the ribs. “Kaice, lighten up, would you. I guess the stick is all the way back up your butt.”

“It’s part of the formal dress uniform,” Chrono said with an utterly straight face. “I’d be reprimanded if it wasn’t properly in place.”

Mei promptly doubled over laughing. “Don’t do that,” she eventually managed, once she had a little of her breath back. “It’s unfair for you to make jokes like that looking all serious.”

“Jokes?”

That produced another outburst and almost tipped her into the river. “Okay, okay, fair enough. I can’t win,” Mei wheezed. She glanced down at her sister and Tiida. “Crap, it looks like they’re looking at us. Come on, let’s go get something to eat. She can protect her own virtue if she feels like it.”

They found a stall selling wraps, and wound up on a bench, looking down at the silvery expanse of the city below. 

“It’s so good to have proper food again,” Mei said through a full mouth. “I was having to eat 97er food all through that mission. There was just way too much bland rice and noodles. I liked the seafood, though.”

Chrono, for his part, had picked something which hadn’t been marked with five heat icons and so refrained from commenting. “When do you ship out?” he asked, making conversation.

“Dunno. Still waiting on orders. I hope I didn’t count as dropping out of the training. It’d be a pain in the butt to start all over again.” Mei gestured with her food. “And you probably got years of tribunals and stuff ahead of you?”

“You’re trying to be funny, but it’s not too far off,” Chrono said grimly. He sighed. “I think this probably locks me out of a command path,” he admitted. “People’re going to remember this. I got a bunch of congratulations from Senior Enforcers, but I embarrassed the higher ups. And broke the rules. And didn’t report things properly. And assaulted a superior officer and his familiars and also a few people who tried to stop me. On top of the... uh, mess with Takamachi and the fact that she got away again, uh... well, if I ever got a ship of my own, it’d probably be a cargo ship.”

“My disciplinary record is nearly clean, and I just got another bunch of commendations,” Mei gloated. “Maybe you could ask for a perfect recruit like me to vouch for you.”

“Life isn’t fair,” Chrono said sadly.

She punched him in the arm. “Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, for one, _princess_ ,” he retorted, “things aren’t fair that someone as perfect as you isn’t stuck in the same hearings that I am.”

Mei beamed. “Yes! Someone who calls me princess!”

“I was being sarcastic!”

“Don’t care! I’ll take what I can get!” She shrugged. “Don’t envy you all those briefings. I got mine out of the way already. Not much to say, really. ‘Got my face kicked in by the Healer, got my core drained, it really hurt’. You were totes busier than me.” She sighed. “I don’t trust me,” she said in a little voice. “Not really. They’re still the Cloud Knights. Still the killing machines of the Book of Darkness. I bet they don’t even remember.”

“Remember?”

“Killing my dad,” Mei said. “I was kind of hoping that... I dunno. That they’d all shut down or something. It just feels wrong that they’re getting to run around just because they didn’t kill anyone this time. I mean, yeah, they’re only running around in an exercise hall ‘cause they’re locked up, but I’d rather just have them tossed into Imaginary Space like the other bits of the Book.”

“Yes. I know how you feel,” Chrono said honestly. “I don’t like it. But I don’t think that matters.”

“What?”

“I mean, I don’t think it matters that I don’t like it. The Book of Darkness won’t be rampaging any more. I dropped its corrupted archival system into Imaginary Space myself. It doesn’t have an archival system, it doesn’t have a defence system, and Takamachi blew up the bit it used to absorb knowledge when it tried to absorb her. There is something very wrong with that girl.”

“Something very awesome, you mean,” Mei corrected him.

“No, I don’t. I was far too close to the spell she used to do it,” he said with a shudder. “But the Book is neutered. So I can grit my teeth and let the Cloud Knights have a chance to be the people their master says they are. If they really were just being controlled by the corruption, it wasn’t their fault. And if that’s just a lie - well, they’ve been beaten before. They’re not invincible.” Chrono leaned back, spreading his arms out on the bench. “So I think that went pretty well,” he said to the sky. “Not perfectly, of course. I could have taken Takamachi if she hadn’t cheated and run away. But pretty w... oof.” He turned to glare at Mei. “What was that for?”

“You, sir, are a lump,” Mei observed. 

“Stop prodding me in the ribs!”

“Stop being a lump.”

“Do it again and I’ll lump you!”

“I don’t know what you mean by that, sir, but I doubt you should address a princess like that. It is most uncivil behaviour and... ow! Enforcer brutality!”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You poked me in the back with some invisible spell!”

“Just your guilty conscience.”

“I’ll guilty your conscience!”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means this! Hi-yaah!”

“Stop creasing my uniform! I’ve got hours more of boring tribunal today!”

...

“... was that just your sister?” Tiida asked, frowning.

“Um. Probably. Her laugh is... it’s distinctive,” Rizu admitted. “And wasn’t that Harlaown?”

“I think it was,” he said, running his fingers through the grass. “Do you think there’s something going on with them?”

Rizu thought about it. “Um. Well, you know the idea that good g-girls like bad boys, right?”

“Yes?”

“He’s sort of the opposite of that, even if he dresses all in black and has spikes on his shoulders. And I don’t know why she’d be laughing at him. He’s serious all the time.”

Tiida grinned. “Yeah. He is that. So maybe good boys like bad girls.”

Rizu slapped his fingers. “Bad,” she told him. “She’s not a bad girl! She just... she just... we don’t even know there’s anything there,” she concluded weakly.

“Well, maybe there isn’t. But it’s still worth implying it to see if he blushes,” Tiida said wickedly.

Rizu giggled. “Oh, you’re terrible,” she said. “But... she’s not watching anymore.” She leaned in to peck him on the lips.

“You know, I thought the very same thing,” he said, returning the favour.

...

**14 days after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

The hall had once been a maintenance silo for fighter craft for a long forgotten empire. There were still a few of the skeletal structures of their long-forgotten war machines, though Jail had thoroughly pillaged them for any usable parts left behind. Now only a few of the machine bays were occupied, with brand new white machinery and computer bays. In one of them, a little girl standing on a box leaned over a cracked and blackened red orb, peering at it through a magnifying field.

“I don’t know, Dollie,” Alicia mused. “She still looks pretty beat up to me. Raising Heart, how’s your self-repair doing?

[I can perform no more repairs without assistance, ma’am. I have completed all repairs my internal protocols can handle without specialist attention.]

“Mmff,” sniffed Alicia, stroking her entirely imaginary beard thoughtfully. “And you’ve had ages to get started. Dollie, what do you think?”

The doll hung in the air; its head slightly tilted to one side, and said nothing. Alicia huffed.

“Fine, fine, we’ll try it your way,” she said. “But I’m warning you, if you’re wrong...”

With a click, she twisted Raising Heart’s gem form and unfolded the phase-shifted lattice of components. Almost immediately afterwards, she had to drop it and jump back, squeaking. The Device fell onto one of the many workbenches in the airy T-shaped room that Alicia had commandeered. Bits of it were glowing alarmingly bright red in her IR overlay.

“Ahh! It’s even worse than I thought!” Alicia gasped in horror. “Dollie! You foolish fool! You’ve doomed us all! Unless...”

She darted in, passing Baton over the glowing bits and casting a cooling spell. “Baton! Connect to Raising Heart’s coolant reservoir and top it all the way up!” she commanded. “Quickly, quickly, before it’s too late!”

A rather anticlimactic moment passed.

[Transfer complete,] reported Baton.

[Coolant reservoirs at maximum. Routing to damaged regions. Thank you, ma’am,] Raising Heart chimed in slightly off-key tones, the Jewel Seed in its cradle pulsing slightly with every word. [I would advise that the highest priority of repair is-]

“Didn’t I just save you from exploding?” Alicia said meaningfully.

Raising Heart paused. [Running self-analysis. Risk of explosion is minimal. Previous risk of explosion was mi-]

Alicia spun around and thrust her arms up victoriously, tilting her head back and basking in imagined applause. “And ‘Licia Testarossa saves the day again!” she cheered. “From the terrible nasty stuff that would’ve happened if she wasn’t so clever! Yaaaaay!”

She cracked an eye open and narrowed it meaningfully. “Dieci,” she prompted. “I just saved us from a giant ‘splosion. You’re meant to be cheering.”

“Yay,” said Dieci flatly, not moving from her seat on one of the nearby benches. Her thumbs kept moving across the small handheld screen in her lap as she spoke, staring across at the opposite wall. “Thank you. Maybe keep working now.”

“Fine, fine,” Alicia pouted, turning back to the lattice and studying it carefully. “Argh, Nanoha really messed you up, Raising Heart! Maybe I shouldn’t have done Bardiche first... oh well. Which Emergency Mode did you go to?”

[Emergency Mode 3, ma’am. “Really Serious Emergency Needs Fixing”.]

“Nanoha!” Alicia’s voice broke two octaves in outrage, and she cast a quick protection spell over her hands and thumped the bench before reaching into the lattice and gingerly unfolding it further. “Show me a map of what’s still broken and what you fixed!” She studied the pink display that popped up and hissed in frustration. “Argh argh argh, I don’t even understand half this stuff yet! I’m gonna have to read loads more to fix you up properly! And the books are all stupid and take too long to say things and I have to work out what they mean!”

[My apologies, ma’am.]

Alicia sighed, the high-pitched energy receding. “Nah. S’not your fault. An’ it looks like you fixed about half of it by yourself, so well done on that. The rest is just gonna take a while, kay?”

[Yes ma’am.]

Dieci didn’t actually move her head, but her attention seemed to refocus slightly and she tapped her handheld game twice to pause it. “I’ll look through the books to find things,” she offered. “If you tell me what to find. But I have a mission tomorrow. So I can’t help then.”

“Mmm hmm,” Alicia nodded vaguely, squinting into Raising Heart’s innards. “Uh. Start on the... mm. You see this six-legged beetle thing?”

“Crystal core.”

“Beetle thing.”

Dieci sighed. “Yes.”

“And these wires coming out of it into the grey chocolate bar thing? The chocolate bar thing next to the glowy whirly bit?”

“... yes,” repeated Dieci in a pained tone.

“Yeah, start by looking for whatever they are, ‘cause I dunno what they do, but they’re broken.”

Dieci sat still for a moment, a tiny crease marring her forehead. “If you don’t know what they are,” she started, “how do you know they’re-”

“Alicia?” Fate poked her head through the door. “I came to ask if you’d...” She trailed off. “Eaten,” she finished half-heartedly, staring at the chaos covering the workbenches. “Uh. What... is that Bardiche?” She rushed over to her Device, which had been unfolded to expose the glowing cradle that held the Jewel Seed. Unlike Raising Heart’s, this one was closed and surrounded by shaped crystal lenses and thick, heavily-insulated cables. Alicia intercepted her in a near-tackle and smacked her hands away.

“Don’t touch don’t touch don’t touch!” she scolded. “He’s fine, I finished him yesterday, I’m just leaving him stretched out for a few hours to let the machines get a better look inside him an’ make sure everything’s okay. _You_ took care of him in the big fight. Unlike _some_ people.” She cast a malevolent glare back at Raising Heart.

But Fate missed her implication, because she was already looking at the third occupied bench, her eyes wide. “Alicia,” she whispered. “That’s...”

Alicia’s expression faltered, and she moved over to the bench. Even by the chaos of her other projects, it was obvious that this Device was a mess; mostly disassembled and in a state of total disarray. Some attempts to restore new order to the thoroughly dismantled lattice, but they were clumsy and ran counter to what remaining pattern there was left over from its original state.

Lost amid the chaos, a pair of long, coiled whips could just about be seen.

“It...” Alicia said haltingly. “I... I thought... mama... mama won’t be using it anymore. Will she?” She blinked rapidly. “A-and... that’s not _its_ fault, and it w-would be mean to just... leave it or throw it away. S-so I’ve been rebuilding it. Because I couldn’t... I didn’t want to... I was just going to use it, but then I saw it and remembered how mama always used to have it wh-when I was playing and I couldn’t...”

Fate hugged her. Alicia hugged back, sniffling. “And... and she’d be mad but also prob’ly proud of how clever I am,” she said into Fate’s shoulder. “And...”

She paused, and her breath hitched several times in the circle of Fate’s arms.

“... and I’m calling it ‘Precious Memory’,” she finished, eventually. “Because... it sounds like...”

“I know,” Fate whispered, hugging tighter. “It’s a good name. She’d like it a lot. So... so would Linith.”

Alicia whimpered as though she’d been struck, and Fate bit down on her lip hard.

“If you need any help...” she offered.

“I’m helping her,” Dieci put in quietly. She paused for a moment, thinking. “She just saved us all from an explosion?” she added, though it sounded more like a question than a statement. It did the job, though. Sniffing and wiping her eyes on a sleeve, Alicia pulled back.

“Yeah,” she agreed bravely. “So... so I should get back to work. On Raising H-heart. Because she’s worse than I thought ‘cause of how Nanoha fights, and I’ll go back to Precious Memory... later.”

Fate nodded. “I’ll come back in an hour or so, then,” she said. “With food.”

...

**17 days after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

“... gotta be some ramen left in here, c’mon... argh.”

Arf sat back and blew her hair out of her eyes with a huff. Despite her best efforts and three rounds of searching, the bags they’d haphazardly brought with them from Earth refused to yield any delicious noodley goodness.

Chewing her lip and scowling at the unfairness, she looked up and regarded the kitchen with wary uncertainty. It looked different to the kitchens from the Garden of Time, Earth or Schzenais, which were unfortunately the sum of her experience with kitchens. And Linith had done most of the food preparation in the first and last cases, while her time on Earth had mostly been limited to what foods could be microwaved in five minutes or less.

However, she had the basics down. There was the heating-food-up-thing. The keeping-food-cold-thing. The cutting-food-up-place. The...

Arf peered at a squat, roundish machine and the arcane metal protrusions that jutted down into a little hollow in the middle. There was a distinct lack of helpful explanatory labels.

... well, all she really needed was the first three, and she could work out how to make them do what she wanted by trial and error. Probably. Well enough to keep Fate and the others fed, at least. She wasn’t going to trust anyone else here to do so; not after Linith’s warnings.

She could start with soup. That sounded easy enough. And she could probably… probably open a link to Nanoha and ask for advice if she got really, really stuck and…

“Vesta!” she barked reflexively, catching a grey-black blur out of the corner of her eye. “Stop right there!”

The blur skidded to a halt and resolved into a kitten carrying something flat and electronic in her mouth. Arf gratefully abandoned the kitchen to get a closer look, and growled.

“Vesta,” she groaned, extracting it from the kitten’s jaws with no small difficulty. “She’s not gonna get better if she spends all her time awake and playing games. She needs to sleep. And keep her hands in the goop so they can finish healing. Quit taking her things like this.”

_‘She’s_ bored _, though!’_ Vesta complained. Arf rolled her eyes.

“Good. Tell her to channel her boredness into getting better faster. And... urgh, I’ll help you try to find something she can do that won’t need her hands. Once I’ve done some food. Okay?”

Vesta’s tail lashed unhappily, but her mistress’s best interests won out over her orders. _‘Fine,’_ she grumbled. _‘Oh, and the Doctor’s been wanting to poke around in, um... in Precia’s things. Again. So we should probably go through them first, but...’_

Arf winced. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Can you distract Fate while I take first run at that? I don’t wanna make her do it.”

The sight of a kitten attempting to pull off a salute was an odd one, but Vesta made it work. _‘Aye aye, senpai!’_ she said, her tail standing at attention. _‘You can do the boring bit and I’ll... ah! I can get Fate to entertain mistress for a while! Two birds with one laser beam!’_

Arf snorted, but let her scamper off. She turned and surveyed the kitchen again, biting her lip.

... food could wait for now. They weren’t _too_ hungry yet, and as long as they kept running tox scans of their meals it was probably safe to eat what the Doctor provided. And this was a more pressing priority anyway.

The meagre collection of bags they’d managed to bring was... well, it was meagre. The few she’d carted into the kitchen were a bust; there was nothing important in them, including ramen. That left the ones still stored in the medical ward. Arf shrunk down to puppy-form and snuck in quietly, looking in on Nanoha’s room as she passed and making for...

... the other one. Just disturbing the clinical silence of the bare room felt wrong, somehow. Like she was violating something sacred. The bed that Precia had lain on was empty now, but her presence still somehow lingered. It made Arf’s fur prickle, and she made for the bags with gritted teeth.

Rooting through them felt even more disrespectful than just being here. But she forced herself through it, sorting things one by one into three piles; safe, strange and secret. The second one was... annoyingly large, honestly. She didn’t understand most of the things Precia had seen fit to bring with them. But if Jail kept pushing, they could occupy him with the safe stuff long enough for the others to see what they could identify.

She’d made her way through two and a half bags before she found the flat tablet device. At first glance it looked no different to several others that had been buried in the same bag, but this one turned on as she pulled it out. Arf yelped, glancing back at the curtain-shrouded bed as she scrambled to turn it off, but froze as the tablet spoke.

“Hello Arf,” it said in Linith’s voice.

Arf almost dropped it. Sheet white, she turned it in nerveless fingers to see the sandy-haired woman onscreen, smiling up at her from the past. A quiet sob forced its way out.

“Linith?” she whispered.

“Dear heart,” Linith said sadly. “If you’re listening to this... well, the worst has probably happened. At the very least, I’m gone. And I’m sorry – so very sorry – that you probably didn’t get to say your goodbyes.”

Arf choked on another sob, the image blurring as tears flooded her eyes.

“There is so much I want to say to you, but I haven’t the time to say all of it,” Linith went on. “I’m growing weaker, and so I must be brief. Arf. The others have their own messages, but this one is for you. Since the day Fate found you in the forest, you’ve done your best to look after her, as she looked after you. You cared for her during her training, you were there for her as she searched for the Jewel Seeds, and you’ve protected her in battle more times than I can count. I’m prouder than I can say to have known you, and I can’t imagine a better familiar for our little girl.

“But now I’m going to ask you to do something more. Fate and Alicia will be heartbroken, and while Vesta blunts the edge of Nanoha’s... quirks, they’re both still of a kind. Those four don’t really know when to stop, and they’ll drive themselves too hard once Precia and I are gone. I need you to look after them, Arf. To care for them all like you’ve cared so well for Fate.”

Breathing hitching, Arf reached out to trace the edge of Linith’s face. The older woman’s eyes were getting a little watery, but she was smiling through the tears.

“It has been my privilege and my honour to care for you,” she said. “I love you all so, so much, and every day I spent with you was happy. And I know, in my heart, that I can trust you to carry on that love, and that care, and that happiness. A family needs a centre, Arf. Be that for them. You can do it. I know you can.”

“I am,” Arf whispered. “I will.”

Linith’s smile turned blinding, as if in response to her promise. “Good girl,” she said softly. “And goodbye, my little one.”

The screen winked off, fading to black, and Arf stayed cuddled around it for a few minutes of shaky breathing. The other tablets no doubt had similar messages on them; waiting to be touch-triggered by the other four. She should finish sorting through the bags... sort out the tablets, hand them out.

... but not right now, she decided.

Time to tackle that soup and get her family fed.

...

**20 days after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

And then it was later.

Snow fell lightly on the wilting winter flowers of a wide meadow. A stream wound through it lazily; ice crusting the edges of the water, and pine forests stretched up the slopes of a small mountain beyond the far treeline.

Five figures gathered around a freshly dug grave. It wasn’t hidden. There was no need. They’d found this place by jumping randomly; an unpopulated world with nothing to draw attention to it. Precia Testarossa would rest here in secret. Her last refuge would be known only to the five of them.

Slowly, with tears streaming down her cheeks, Alicia knelt down and placed a circlet of flowers on the freshly turned earth. Fate moved up behind her as she stood again, folding her little sister into her arms. The two of them were dressed in deep mourning crimson, which made them look even more alike than usual. Nanoha watched with aching eyes, a painful lump in her throat.

She’d hoped. She’d really, really hoped. Precia had seemed so _well_ on Schzenais, so _happy_...

... well.

At least her last few days had been happy. She reached out quietly and took Vesta’s hand, then groped around with the other to find Arf’s. She got two reassuring squeezes in response.

“Precia Testarossa was a great mage, a great master and a great mother,” Fate said softly. The snow flurried around her face and flakes of it caught in her unbound hair. “She brought her daughter back when nobody else could, and gave her a sister – and a family – to look after her. She was brilliant, beautiful, and loving.” Her voice choked up a little as she drew Bardiche and held him up over the grave in a salute. Opposite her, Nanoha drew Raising Heart and mirrored Fate’s stance; the two Devices crossing in an arch of honour. Shakily, Alicia held a gloved hand out beneath them; fingers outstretched.

“L-Linith was warm, kind, and devoted to her children,” Nanoha said, taking over the eulogy. “She accepted strangers into her family and made them feel welcome, and she never let her charges feel sad – not even for a minute. She looked after Precia and she looked after us.”

Alicia half-turned, just enough to bury her head in Fate’s side.

“They will be missed,” Fate managed, “more than we can say. And we will never forget them.”

“Never,” Nanoha agreed, and heard the familiars and Alicia echo her.

It felt final. It felt fearful. Precia and Linith were gone.

They were alone.

...

**32 days after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

But of course, life went on. And part of life going on was dealing with the aftermath of life not going on for some people.

“... and so your mother set up a trust as part of the arrangements for her demise,” the lawyer said. She was an elderly lady dressed in stern black with snow white hair and pale eyes, but seemed to be trying to make an effort to seem gentler to the young girls. The office was soft and warm, and outside snow flurried down from the reddened sky. “That is, she made sure that there are people who will handle things like looking after you and the like. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Fate said. She looked even smaller than usual, still dressed in her deep red mourning clothes. Alicia sat on her lap, being cuddled close. “She explained some of these things b-before... before the end. Um, basically, we’re going to stay at school as boarding students. And when I graduate I become Lezi and Ami’s guardian and look after them until they graduate. Same for Nene and Vittoria.”

“Mmm,” Nanoha said. “I understand.” She had the easier task here, by a long way. Vesta was just her familiar. Alicia was Fate’s little sister who had just lost her mother.

“That’s good,” the lawyer said. “Now, until you two graduate, a representative of the trust will serve as your legal guardian. That means that - well, for example, when you need permission from a parent to go on a school trip, it’ll be their job to give that permission. They’ll also be there for you if... well, you know, if you want anyone to talk to or anything like that. If you have a problem, you should go to them and they’ll either be able to help you or know someone who can help you.”

“Yes,” said Fate.

“Now, from day to day, you’ll be living at school. I’ve been in touch with them and they already have arrangements set up for students who are orphans. This does mean you’ll be at school during the holidays too, which I realise will be a change.”

Nanoha raised her hand slightly. “What if we want to travel or go on holiday somewhere?” she asked. She looked out the window. “I miss proper sunlight already.”

“That will need to be discussed at the time. You need an exit visa to leave Schzenais, and that requires the government to give you permission. Normally that’s not a big deal, but the arrangement with your mother does mean that as guests and non-citizens, your travel options are limited until all of you have reached the age of majority.” The old lady crossed her hands on her lap. “However, there are still some things that can be done. You’re right - for people who aren’t born here, it’s often good to take short holidays away. Some people just can’t handle our sun or the way the day-night cycle is different for too long.”

“Okay,” Nanoha said quietly. She didn’t like the sound of that. Having spent time on Earth recently, the homesickness was back - and the idea of not being able to leave here until she was _old_ didn’t sound very inviting. Her heart twinged as she thought about the perfect dream world the Book had offered her. Why couldn’t that have been real? Why couldn’t she have lived with her parents? Fate and Alicia could probably have lived with them too, even if Precia was dead in the real world. Why couldn’t everyone have just been _friends?_ Why couldn’t she have lived on a real _proper_ planet where it didn’t always snow and where it wasn’t cold and the sky was the proper colour and the sun wasn’t a cool red disc and... why?

Raising Heart chimed quietly, and Nanoha checked her as Fate asked about something to do with their syllabus and extra classes. There was a letter in the dead drop she’d shared with Yuuno. A reply to the one she’d sent him.

She looked up carefully, dismissing the notification. She could tell him where they were... or maybe let Fate know about the dead drop? If they were careful, they could try to talk the TSAB into trusting that Alicia was safe, and then they could get pardoned and not have to live here and they could all... her friends could all be...

“Nanoha?” Fate was looking at her. “What is it?”

Nanoha met her gaze, and felt the smooth, hard surface of Raising Heart between her fingers. She closed her eyes.

“It’s nothing, Farina,” she said quietly. “Just an update. What were you saying about extra magic classes?”

This wasn’t that perfect dream world, after all.

She’d just have to make the most of it.

...


	15. Final Words

**35 days after the defeat of the Book of Darkness**

A silver-grey destroyer dropped into the thin atmosphere of a red planet. The _Ys_ was small and out of date; one of many that had been pressed into service scouring the sector for remnants of the Mariage. The TSAB’s manpower was stretched short out here at the very edge of their reach. This ship carried only four squads of six marines – under half its nominal compliment of sixty.

“Lieutenant, deploy and investigate the anomalous signal,” ordered Commander Birturbo. Tall, thin, and pale faced, the commander had been tense and nervous throughout the entire mission. “It could be nothing, but I don’t want any needless losses.”

“Sir!” Lieutenant Dara snapped off a textbook salute, and looked around the cramped teleporter bay in the belly of the ship, meeting the faces of her understrength platoon.

She waited for her superior to duck back out of the room before scowling. Short brown hair framed a tired face, and her expression was snappish and irritable after days of searching. “All right! You should all know the drill by now, but apparently boredom is making you slack off. That last deployment was a mess! So to reiterate; _any_ and _all_ suspicious signals are to be treated as if they could be a Mariage hotspot. That means spells primed, corners covered, body cams on and _don’t let your guard down_. I spot anyone chatting or watching a feed, I will bust them down so far that they never see daylight again. Clear?”

“Dara,” Estelle groaned from the back of the small huddle. “This is the fifth dead-end _today_ , you can’t pretend you’re not just as bored as us.”

Dara gave him a killing glare. “We treat this seriously,” she repeated, low and dangerous. “Teleport on my mark. I’ll be heading down with Section C, since they’re down one man. Section A, off you go!”

Six flashes of light marked their departure from the ship, and the signals came back reporting a clean deployment. Section B deployed, and then C. They materialised on the Martian surface in full Barrier Jackets, immediately sinking a few centimetres into the rusted sand. A dust storm was sweeping through the region, rendering the horizon invisible behind a reddish haze and obscuring much of the sun and starlight. In a testament to their professionalism – or possibly their desire not to be harangued anymore by their lieutenant – the squad fell into immediate formation; adjusting their colours to blend into the surroundings and crouching low to survey the area.

“Ys, this is Dara,” she transmitted back up to the ship. “Platoon is on the ground. Any change in the anomaly?”

“No change,” Commander Birturbo replied. “The dense terrain and the dust storm are interfering with scanners, though.” 

“Understood.” Dara gave her orders, and the other sections began to advance, deploying their search spells and sweeping the rocky terrain.

One of Section C came scuttling low through the storm. “El-tee,” Aleko whispered. “I’ve got something on Area Scan. Something humanoid – not just the wind.”

The little group clustered closer together and peered through the gloom towards the cliffs a few hundred metres away. Dara’s eyes narrowed as she picked out what Aleko had noticed; the slightest suggestion of a humanoid figure moving coming out of the shadow of a cave.

“Down, down!” she hissed, grabbing the two marines next to her and yanking them down. The rest of them hit the ground a second later, burrowing down into the sand to avoid notice.

The figure stood unnaturally still, searching the landscape with slow sweeps of its head. Dara swore quietly.

“They must have caught the teleport beacon. They know we’re here, they just don’t know where,” she hissed. Opening a secure link to the _Ys_ , she called it in.

“That’s a Mariage,” the commander said intensely. “It’s exposed itself for our scanners. Lieutenant, standing orders are to search and destroy.”

Lieutenant Dara gritted her teeth. “Sir, we don’t know how many there are.”

“We’re prepared for close air support if the estimates on their remaining numbers are incorrect,” the man said. “But we need to confirm if this is their nest, or just a scouting mission. We can’t risk them getting awa—” His image broke up and scattered.

“Aleko?” Dara snapped.

“I’m trying,” he muttered back urgently. “We’re being jammed. I can’t try to punch through it, not without alerting everything within a hundred kilometres.”

“So we retreat?” asked Riva. Dara shook her head, hissing in frustration.

“The _Ys_ will be trying to get through. If we run now, they’ll vanish and we’ll have to hunt them down all over again. But if they’re out here and only sent one unit out, I’m betting they’re low on numbers.” She checked her links, made sure that she had contact with the other sections and moved A and B into position.

“We’ll take point. Remember, they’ll all be linked – as soon as one goes down, the rest will know, and start getting ready for us. Or escaping. We go in quickly, we cover all the angles, we lead with a scry-spell and we take them apart by the numbers. Estelle and Tatra lead – Estelle, shoot anything that moves, Tatra, you’re on defence.” The Mid- and Belkan-users nodded, and Dara continued. “Riva and Trabant next. Riva, you provide support if anything gets too close, Trabant is on forward watch.” Riva hummed in acknowledgement, shifting her spear into a crossguard mode.

Dara took a deep breath. “Aleko and I will bring up the rear. Anything seems out of place, at any time, you yell it out for the squad. Got it?”

There was a low chorus of acknowledgement. The groaning or boredom from before was gone; replaced by a rush of adrenaline. Dara nodded.

“Trabant, can you dispatch it from here?”

The large man was already sighting down his Device. “Just a moment…” he murmured, shifting position. “Everyone get ready to go… and… firing.”

[Whisper Cannon]

A washed-out blue so pale it was barely visible lanced from his staff and hit the figure in the neck before it could react. The body spun once; head half gone, and burst into liquid flame as it fell.

“Go go go!”

The squad ran for the cave entrance, the other squads moving in behind them. Another figure loomed up as they poured in, but its grey shooting spell glanced off Tatra’s shield and a stutter of fire from three different Devices dispatched it. Trabant launched a line-of-sight scrying spell ahead of them and they sped on through the cave; a window hovering alongside to show them the view around the next corner.

That was the only reason they survived the next two Mariage, which didn’t bother with a shootout. The dark figures were a blur on the advance screen, and only Estelle’s reaction time saved them. A green pulse of force expanded into a web that filled the tunnel, which both creatures slammed into and detonated; spraying acrid chemical goop across the cave walls.

The squad skidded to a halt as the spatter roared into flame, illuminating the gloomy cavern with an eye-hurting orange-white light and sparking flinches where droplets hit their barrier jackets.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop!” shouted Dara. “If we lose momentum they’ll have time for more traps; suicide bombs mean they’re desperate! _Move_ , damn you!”

But the last three Mariage they found weren’t setting traps. Nor were they preparing to fight. Moving more haltingly than their initial charge, unnerved by the near miss, the squad turned into a large cave and found the looming bulk of a supply ship; old and battered.

And taking off.

The marines threw themselves out of the way of the battered ship as it launched, uselessly peppering it with shots.

“Stop it!” Dara broadcast on all channels, sprinting after it.

But there was nothing that ground troops could do. The Ravi emerged from the cave, smashing aside rock in its flight, and…

Bright light lanced down from overhead, punching through the flank of the escaping ship and sending it crashing down into the mountainside. The _Ys_ could be seen overhead, its prow glowing from the discharge of its primary weapon.

“Yes!” shouted Tatra. “The commander came through!”

“Move in!” ordered Dara. “Secure the vessel! Don’t let them get it in the air again!”

A flying leap by Riva got her spear through a bulkhead door as it closed to seal off the ruptured section, and she levered it open with a yell as alarms began blaring. The ship was small – only three internal compartments – and they found the Mariage on the bulkhead’s other side, clustered around an ancient black throne that faced away from the door.

Six spells fired. Two struck and shattered Tatra’s shield. One hit Estelle, who dropped with a yell of pain.

Two Mariage dropped with her, and Riva’s spear pinned the last one to the wall through its chest.

Panting and swearing, Dara limped forward as the others congregated around their downed man. Wincing and raising a hand to shield herself against the burning goop that now filled the entire left half of the room, she grabbed the limp form on the high throne and yanked it into her arms before backing away as far as she could.

“Hey!” she yelled, catching the attention of the section. “We have a man down and a hostage, and that might not have been all of them! Secure the rest of the systems!”

Elbowing the door to the cockpit open, Dara settled the little girl the Mariage had been clustered around in copilot’s seat, pulled Estelle’s body in after her and – with some relief –turned off the alarms. Kneeling to check him over, she sucked air past her teeth. The spell had hit him on the temple; a lethally concentrated bolt of force that had punched through his barrier jacket and knocked him senseless. His breathing was shallow, but regular.

“Lucky,” she told him, straightening. “Very lucky. A little more force and that would have shattered your skull.”

She rose and made her way through to the ruptured compartment they’d come in through, edging carefully around the fire. Aleko was crouching over his Device readout and frowning. “Dara…” he said slowly as she came in, “something weird is going on here. The jamming isn't coming from the ship – it’s not even coming from the cave complex. Why would they stick it outside somewhere?”

“Are you sure? Check again,” she ordered. 

“Lieutenant!” Commander Birturbo’s image was unmoving, but this close he could punch through the jamming to get a voice link. “Do you have the wreckage secured?”

“In progress, sir!” She glanced back at the girl. “We’ve got a hostage – a child.”

“Mark her and we’ll teleport her out,” the man said.

Edging past the burning goop for a third time, she dug a beacon out of her pocket and placed it on the girl. “Ready when you are, sir,” she said. She paused. Wait, with the jamming so thick, maybe it would be safer to…

The little girl vanished in light. “Transfer successful,” Commander Birturbo said. “We’ll take good care of her. Keep on with what you’re doing, lieutenant.”

The man cut the link. Sitting back in his chair, he looked over his silent bridge.

The bodies of his crew lay at their desks. Blood pooled on the floor, well-lit under the bright lights of the ship. They hadn’t suspected anything. Flexing the clawed glove on his hand, the man put his feet up on his command console, and tapped a few buttons on his Device.

“Wait, what’s that?” he said, his voice perfectly mimicking Lieutenant Dara. “There’s more! Kaice! Dammit it, Tatra, take them down! Section A, come in! Come in! They’re all down! How many of those monsters are there? Commander! I need danger close fire support! There were more and they’re all activating!” He wasn’t just mimicking her. He was also mimicking the noises of magic in the background.

“Are you—” he began in the commander’s voice.

“Do it!” he screamed in Lieutenant Dara’s voice.

“Fire support authorised,” he said, in the commander’s voice. He waved his clawed glove idly, and the systems were overridden. “Danger close. Sky Lance.”

Bright light formed between the vessel’s prow, before a ship-grade bombardment spell fell upon the wreckage of the Ravi. The _Ys_ burned the vessel and its own marines from the face of the dusty red planet.

“Commander!” he shouted in the voice of one of the dead crew. “Teleport flicker! They’re through our shields!”

He swore in the commander’s voice. “All hands! Prepare for boarding act—” And then he screamed exactly the scream a man might scream if he was stabbed from behind without expecting it. It was not the first such scream the bridge had heard.

Sitting back in the commander’s seat with a sigh, Due let herself _relax_ , properly, for the first time in days. Her skin squirmed and shifted as flesh and musculature swapped out with other grafts, and she shivered happily as her face returned to her favourite form. A pretty young woman with dirty-blonde hair who looked to be around fifteen sat sprawled out in the chair, a few flecks of blood still on her face. She gave herself a winning smile and a wink in the reflective surface of the screen, and fired one more shot down into the glowing crater to take care of the remainder of Sections A and B. Then, with a languorous stretch, she pulled up a window and made sure that the girl those idiots had found for her was safely secured.

“Well then,” she said, half to herself and half to her comatose passenger. “Time to leave. Can’t keep the Doctor waiting.”

...

Three hours later, a small group entered the UA-27 base of operations, unwounded but with shoulders sagging from tiredness. The tallest carried a tiny form in her arms; and she was flanked by three girls of varying sizes.

A man was waiting for them at the inner entrance, along with a young woman. The eldest of the new arrivals ducked her head prettily as they approached.

“Girls!” Jail greeted the Numbers. “It went well, then?”

Due nodded. “Your intelligence allowed me to pin down the world and lead my proxies there,” she said, her manner as casual as if she was discussing the weather. “I maintained my impersonation of the commander I replaced easily, and eliminated all possible witnesses after my ‘dear men’ secured the Mariage Queen.”

“And the vessel?” Uno asked primly.

Due smiled. “I disposed of the corpses, scrubbed it with Mariage-characteristic Galean cleansing spells, and then vented it. They’ll find the ghost ship in orbit when they follow its emergency broadcast. If your injection code does its job, the TSAB will be chasing Mariage ghosts for decades. My younger sisters’ presence on site close to the target location was useful, but not strictly necessary. If they had not arrived, things would likely have gone exactly as I planned.”

“I helped, I helped!” Quattro added eagerly. “I put up a field to stop them talking! Due said I did well, didn’t you, didn’t you!”

Due shifted the tiny form in her arms to ruffle her sister’s hair fondly. “Quattro was a great help,” she agreed. “You were the most useful one.”

Quattro beamed.

Tre, on the other hand, scowled. “I’m glad _you_ had fun,” she muttered sullenly. “I didn’t get to do _anything_. Might as well not even have been there, right ‘ci?”

Dieci; the last member of the little group, shrugged laconically. “I didn’t mind,” she said softly. “Went as planned. That’s good.”

Tre huffed in annoyance and stomped off. Uno sighed, and trailed after her.

“Hurt feelings?” Jail mused, watching her go. “Hmm. Well, I’m sure she’ll get over it. And an excellent job, well done.” He rubbed his hands together, smiling proudly. “I had complete faith in you, of course, but I’m glad to hear you weren’t injured. And your objective?”

Due hefted the petite figure she carried. A long braid of red hair trailed down from to brush her knees. “Unharmed and asleep,” she said. “She stirred a little when I first picked her up, but nothing since.”

“Ah, poor dear.” Jail nodded sympathetically. “Deprived of an energy source, she can do nothing but sleep, it seems. Well, we’ll see if we can’t sort that out.” He smiled again, the mad gleam in his eyes twinkling at the thought of the new puzzle resting peacefully in front of him.

A small hand tugged at his lab coat and he looked down. Dieci, after a momentary pause, remembered to look up.

“Are we going to have a new sister?” she asked quietly. She had been a lot less lively since the Testarossas had left, Jail noted. Likely missing her friend.

He ruffled her hair paternally. “Perhaps, Dieci,” he agreed. “A new sister, if she proves… amenable to being your friend. And perhaps much more.” Despite himself, a chuckle escaped him as he gently lifted the young Queen of Galea from Tre’s arms, and turned to take her back into the base. “As soon as we can wake her up, I’m sure she’ll be a great help to us.”

“That’s good.” Seeming happier than she had since Alicia had left for parts unknown, Dieci smiled. “I’m glad we rescued her from the TSAB, then.” Behind Dieci, Due grinned. “And it’s good that those servant-things of hers won’t be around anymore.”

Jail couldn’t help it. He shifted Ixpellia in his arms to pat Dieci on the head, and laughed delightedly.

“No, indeed, Dieci,” he managed, as he wiped tears of mirth away from his eyes. She was giggling too, drawn along by his amusement despite not really understanding the joke. “No, they most definitely will not.”

He grinned.

“But I think she’ll be a great help to us anyway.”

...

_Author’s Note: Wow._

_Let me repeat myself. Power Games is over. Wow. This story took far, far longer than I planned or expected – hiatuses caused by the demands of university threw off my writing schedule to a much greater degree than Game Theory did, which coupled with the long-chapter format made for ridiculously long dead periods. I’m not at all happy about that, and henceforth the Gamesverse will be shifting to a shorter chapter length that will hopefully prevent it from happening again._

_But it’s finished now, and it was a pretty wild ride. Thanks, as always, go to EarthScorpion; my cowriter and editor. As with Game Theory, I learned a lot from writing this story – and I was able to use and refine some of the lessons I learnt from Game Theory in the process. There are still flaws in the narrative, just as there were with its prequel, but all in all I’m pretty proud of what I’ve done here._

_Next up in the Gamesverse will be a side story written by EarthScorpion, called **Hide and Seek Games**. Look out for it on his page! And until then, goodbye and thank you for reading!_

...

**END**  



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